Avoided Foods in a Soft Diet

Comprised of soft, easily chewed and digested foods, a soft diet is used by those with mouth, throat or digestive issues. The soft foods make swallowing easier and less painful. There are several foods that should be avoided on a soft diet. A basic guideline is that any food that requires excessive chewing should be abstained from.

Raw Fruits and Veggies

Raw veggies, while healthy, are hard to chew.

Raw fruits and veggies are comprised of a significant amount of cellulose. This makes chewing and digesting them difficult because the body cannot digest cellulose. However, you can cook or mash fruits and vegetables in order to make them easier to chew, swallow and digest.

Food with Seeds

Food with seeds, such as raspberries and blackberries, make chewing difficult and painful. Breads or cakes with seeds or nuts in them should be avoided as well.

Dried Food

Any kind of dehydrated food should be avoided. Removing the water from fruits, veggies or meats makes the resulting food very tough, stringy and difficult to chew and digest.

Non-Tender Meat

Steak can be a tough meat.

Any meat that you have to cut with a knife or tear chunks off of needs to be avoided. Meat must be extremely tender and require little chewing in order to be included in a soft diet. Also keep in mind that most meat requires a significant amount of time to digest and process. Minimize meat inclusion. Avoid hot dogs and brats.

Nuts and Peanut Butter

Avoid nuts. They're hard and crunchy and, as such, should be avoided. Peanut butter is extremely thick and difficult to swallow.

Cheese

Cheese is not only difficult to chew, it's extremely difficult to digest.

Chips, Crackers and Cookies

All are full of grains and sugars and many are crunchy. The grains and sugars make digestion difficult and the crunchiness can cause pain while chewing. Also avoid pretzels and crisps.