If you trust the Internet, just a bowl of soup can fix all of your gut issues. IBS? Soup! Constipated? Soup! Stomach bug? You guessed it, soup! On its face, it makes logical sense. If your tummy is bothering you, eating something that is a lot of liquid should make your insides calmer. The liquid also hydrates you and most soups are full of veggies. The problem is that’s the problem! Our bodies are complex systems. And there’s no one-stop-shop when it comes to fixing something.
And not all soup is the same. Some soups are better than others when it comes to fixing gut issues. Because not all gut issues are the same either. One kind of soup that might work for one gut issue may cause way more harm for another gut issue. It’s tricky.
As someone who has the FODMAP food list memorized (it’s actually on my refrigerator at all times) I can tell you garlic is one of the more misunderstood ingredients. Most people think it’s something that can help with digestion. But garlic and onions (and basically all alliums) are big no-nos for me. If I eat something that has garlic or onion in it, I am making more trips the bathroom than I’d like to admit. In fact, if I am making a recipe that MUST have onions, I have to rinse them for five minutes. It’s a bummer.
So which soups are the best for a specific gut issue? And, more importantly, which ones are the worst for it? We looked at the science and broke it all down for you across nine of the most common gut issues.
How to read this
Nothing on this list treats any disease. If you have a diagnosed condition like Crohn’s disease, colitis, IBS, reflux or diverticular disease, talk to your doctor.
There are proven ways to manage those diseases. Soup is not one of them. Two of the 12 soups appear on both sides of the chart. That’s intentional. This is what we know (and, in a couple of cases, don’t) about foods and those conditions.
Less dramatic than what the infographics claim, but more true. We could have filled in the blanks where the evidence is inconclusive. Instead, we stuck to what we know, which, for two of the nine recommendations, turns out to be that the advice doesn’t pan out.
An IBS flare
✓ Best: Carrot ginger
✗ Worst: Golden turmeric lentil
✓ Carrot ginger, made without the onion and garlic
The best (read: weak) piece of advice for IBS that we have is to try a low FODMAP diet. That is a recommendation made by the American College of Gastroenterology, and it’s a conditional one based on very low quality of evidence. Take out the alliums, and all that’s left is a bowl of broth with a low FODMAP vegetable (carrot) and a spice that makes no difference FODMAP-wise (ginger).
About the safest (read: uninteresting) hot dish you can eat. Again, that last bit is important. “Try” means for a limited time, not forever. “Limited” means weeks, not months.
✗ Golden turmeric lentil
Lentils (and most pulses) tend to be high in GOS so are best avoided, onion isn’t great either. So this soup is made up of 2 of the most likely suspects for causing you problems, which are not helped by the turmeric!
Constipation
✓ Best: Golden turmeric lentil
✗ Worst: Chicken bone broth
✓ Golden turmeric lentil
The same soup. Lentils are full of fiber (in a form that already has water in it!), and fiber is one of the more well-supported dietary supplements for chronic constipation (pooled analysis of randomized trials, 2022, American Journal of Clinical Nutrition). Maybe legumes aren’t for you, because you get bloated.
That’s fine! But bloating and constipation are two separate issues with two separate answers, and it would be a shame to optimize for one if you have the other.
✗ Chicken bone broth
It’s not dangerous, it just has essentially no fiber in it, and that’s what has evidence behind it. So drinking more broth when you actually need more fiber can make it feel like you’re dealing with the issue.
The week after a stomach bug
✓ Best: Chicken bone broth
✗ Worst: Purple cabbage wellness
✓ Chicken bone broth — with a caveat that matters
Broth’s the exception to the rule, because after gastroenteritis what you need is fluid and electrolytes, not nutrition, and that’s why the recommendation is an oral rehydration solution.
But don’t make the mistake of thinking that store-bought soup or broth is a substitute for an oral rehydration solution, because clinical guidance on gastroenteritis lists it specifically as something that isn’t a substitute. If you’re dehydrating fast, a packet from the pharmacy is going to do the job soup just can’t. But when you want something warm that asks nothing of you, reach for the broth.
BRAT (bananas, rice, applesauce, toast) is not recommended. A review published in American Family Physician states that the BRAT diet is overly restrictive and isn’t recommended by the American Academy of Pediatrics. Again, this review is focused on kids, not adults, but it’s indicative of a move away from restrictive diets and back to regular eating as soon as you can tolerate it.
✗ Purple cabbage wellness soup
That’s a lot of insoluble fiber going into a gut that has just been abused. Not unsafe, just very untimely. Wait a week.
Reflux
✓ Best: Pumpkin
✗ Worst: Roasted tomato basil
✓ Pumpkin
It’s mild and thick and it isn’t acidic, and it doesn’t need a mountain of fat to taste like something.
✗ Roasted tomato basil — probably, for you specifically, maybe
Six tomatoes and a roasted red pepper are reduced to a concentrated dose of one of the most commonly reported reflux triggers: tomato.
The 2022 American College of Gastroenterology guideline on reflux doesn’t make a list of foods to avoid. It suggests identifying and reducing your own known triggers. The guideline’s first author has noted that there’s no good evidence that making large changes to your diet will help long term, in part because people find it hard to stick to them.
Cutting out whole food groups on the basis of an article you read is precisely the failure mode the guideline is trying to head off.
Tomato soup is the first thing to try, not the first thing to ban.
An IBD flare
✓ Best: Pumpkin
✗ Worst: Purple cabbage wellness
✓ Pumpkin
The Crohn’s & Colitis Foundation recommends adding these foods: squashes and fork-tender cooked carrots, leafy greens cooked and blended small. That pureed squash soup is basically that recommendation on a platter.
One asterisk: the version of this recipe going around uses coconut milk, and the Foundation lists coconut oil among the foods associated with increased inflammation. The broth, not coconut milk, keeps the soup on the right side of that.
✗ Purple cabbage wellness soup
Cabbage, cauliflower, and (who would guess this?) mushrooms (as in the creamy mushroom soup) all fall under the high-fiber category of trigger foods. (Mushrooms also fall under the category of sugar alcohols because mushrooms = mannitol.)
It’s important to note that trigger foods aren’t necessarily harmful, they just, ahem, trigger you.
In other words, you might have some uncomfortable symptoms when you eat them, but that doesn’t mean they’re inflaming you. (Your mileage may vary: the list is a great place to start, but your gut is smarter than the gut list.)
Bloating and gas, with no diagnosis attached
✓ Best: Zucchini and spinach
✗ Worst: Beetroot and carrot glow
✓ Zucchini and spinach
Smoothest bowl of the two graphics. No pulses, no brassica veg, no apple, no dairy. If you are bloated and you don’t know why, this is the one that is least likely to be to blame.
✗ Beetroot and carrot glow soup
Carrots and beetroots are great low FODMAP foods to have in your soup repertoire, go easy on apples, as one blended into a soup is a pretty big serving (more than we usually consume in one sitting, that is). Apples are high FODMAP in two ways: they’re both high in fructose and sorbitol.
It’s also worth making the distinction between two seemingly-similar soups: spinach healing soup and zucchini. Both are green.
Neither sounds likely to cause any tummy trouble. The difference: healing soup includes garlic and onion. Creamy mushroom soup is delicious, no doubt, but it’s also another soup to watch out for if you’re sensitive to polyols: mushrooms (one of very few veggies) are high in mannitol according to Monash.
The week after a course of antibiotics
✓ Best: Miso, stirred in late
✗ Worst: The probiotic capsule
✓ Miso, stirred in at the end
A randomized trial at Stanford University, published in Cell, found that a diet of fermented foods improved gut microbial diversity and reduced levels of 19 inflammatory proteins in the blood. The high-fiber arm of that same trial didn’t do either thing over the course of its 10 weeks, which was a surprise for the study’s authors and should give pause to anyone who thinks fiber alone can quickly repair a damaged microbiome.
✗ The probiotic capsule you were about to buy
It’s not a soup, and that’s kind of the point.
It’s tempting to reach for a probiotic supplement when trying to restore gut health, especially after a round of antibiotics. But a 2018 study published in Cell found that while some participants took antibiotics, some took antibiotics and a probiotic supplement, and some took antibiotics and had their pre-antibiotic gut microbiome reintroduced after the treatment.
The participants who received their own microbiome recovered the fastest, while the group that took a probiotic supplement had a “markedly delayed and persistently incomplete” recovery of their gut bacteria, as compared to the group that only took antibiotics. Now, that’s a small study about probiotic supplements, not foods, and there’s no reason to stop reaching for your favorite fermented foods if you eat them regularly. But it does suggest that the idea of simply adding more bacteria from a jar isn’t necessarily a good one, which is the premise a lot of post-antibiotic probiotic advice online is based on.
Diverticular disease, between flares
✓ Best: Any of them
✗ Worst: The rule you were given
✓ Any of them
Genuinely.
✗ The rule you were given
If you’re suffering from an acute flare of diverticulosis, follow your physician’s or other health professional’s dietary advice. They know best about what you should eat this week (rather than follow the dietary advice in this soup article!). Otherwise, you can eat nuts, seeds, corn, and popcorn. The oft-repeated advice to avoid these foods if you have diverticulosis (because a seed or corn-husk might lodge in a diverticulum) is no longer backed by evidence.
In 2008, researchers published eighteen years of follow-up and found that nuts, seeds, corn and popcorn did not increase the risk of diverticulosis or its complications. The team published their findings in JAMA and concluded that the recommendation to avoid these foods should be reconsidered.
That was eighteen years ago, and people are still being handed the list. So, if you’ve been passing on seeds in soups, you can stop.
Nausea
✓ Best: Carrot ginger
✗ Worst: Creamy mushroom
✓ Carrot ginger
Of all the ingredients depicted in either of these graphics, ginger is the one that has the strongest body of evidence behind it.
In a meta-analysis of five placebo-controlled trials with 363 surgical patients, a fixed dose of at least one gram of ginger beat out the placebo when it comes to post-operative nausea and vomiting. In another meta-analysis of twelve studies that included 1,278 pregnant women, ginger was found to significantly improve nausea, though the number of vomiting episodes did not significantly decrease. And in a review of ten trials with chemotherapy patients, ginger was shown to be useful in easing the acute form of the side effect, but not the delayed kind. Different contexts, different studies, same result, it works.
It is the broadest body of randomized evidence behind any single ingredient in this article. And it’s in a soup that only takes twenty minutes!
✗ Creamy mushroom
Fat slows the stomach’s emptying and a heavy bowl is a hard sell to someone already queasy. Make it light and make it hot.
The one with the biggest claim and the thinnest file
It’s sold as healing your gut lining, sealing your leaky gut, rebuilding your villi.
Bone broth is sold harder than anything else here.
There isn’t a single human trial of bone broth and intestinal permeability. There are some animal studies using a colitis model, some studies on tight junctions and gelatin, some human trials on glutamine in critically ill people taking concentrated amounts, but no studies where people are sipping broth. One human randomized crossover trial found that collagen (10 grams a day) did not improve markers of gut integrity.
It’s a reasonable hypothesis, but hasn’t been shown in humans. It’s good for you in that it’s salty and warm and nice to have when you’re sick, but it’s not going to do what’s on the label.
And the sodium nobody mentions
Miso soup recipes call for two tablespoons of miso paste, and according to the USDA’s food composition database, miso has 3,728 milligrams of sodium per 100 grams. A tablespoon is 17 grams.
That means one serving contains approximately 1,270 milligrams of sodium, which is 55 percent of the recommended 2,300 milligrams of sodium per day. The soup remains a worthwhile dish, though. You can cut your miso to one tablespoon, or use a low-sodium paste, and there isn’t much of a sacrifice.
What holds up across all nine
A wellness soup is chock full of at least a dozen different ingredients, making it difficult to figure out which one affected you. It’s better to stick to the basics and only make one change at a time. As it turns out, there isn’t all that much about soups in the above article.
There’s a lot more about fiber, fluid, fat, fermentation and carbohydrates (specifically which carbohydrates bother your particular gut). Soups just happen to be a convenient vehicle for delivering many of these things at once, which is probably why it pops up so often in gut health articles.
All 9 Verdicts at a Glance
How we put this together, and what it does not cover
As with all articles like this, we have to say that this is not medical advice. You should consult your doctor or other medical provider if you have a gut issue.
And everyone reacts differently, so this is not a be-all end-all. We’re just following things like FODMAPs and data and studies out of places like the Crohn’s and Colitis Foundation, as well as the International Organization for the Study of Inflammatory Bowel Diseases (I bet that’s a fun place to work!) But I’ve had bowel issues my whole life. Or at least for the past 40 years. I have tried every type of diet under the sun. I’ve been to the gastro more times than I can count. And it’s still not right. I do know what my triggers are, though. And that’s half the battle. But the problem is it’s a trial and error to learn what sets me off. Which means a lot of bathroom trips when something is a trigger.
It’s all very frustrating because I have to ask what’s in everything. It doesn’t matter if I’m ordering at a restaurant, or over at someone’s house. It can really make you feel like an outcast. And a Debbie Downer. But we just have to keep trying to figure out what works and what doesn’t to help keep the blowouts (as I like to call them) at a minimum.
So take this list for what it is. Give the good ones a try, but make sure you don’t have any urgent travel plans after you do.
Martha ‘Marti’ Jones founded Fitness Four after three decades of living with IBS, Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, and pernicious anemia.
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