Hyperactive Metabolism

"In a rather morbid study, Canadian researchers observed thousands of people for 12 years, carefully noting when they kicked the bucket. Not surprisingly, the super-obese subjects died first, proving once and for all that all the video games where you gain more health as you eat more are not scientifically accurate."

— Cracked, 6 Slacker Behaviors That Science Says Are Good for You

Video game characters have long had the amazing ability to heal wounds through a good filling meal. One is left to conclude that the heroes in video games possess a Hyperactive Metabolism that digests food and converts it to the necessary proteins needed for bodily repair at superhuman rates.

Whenever one deals with a Hyperactive Metabolism, several main points show themselves:

1. Eating (and sometimes even drinking) heals you, rather than just filling you up and giving you some energy. In many games, food is the primary medicine/recovery system of choice. If other healing items are present, however, food is usually a lesser healing item, only healing a few points, while more potent medicines, potions, and first-aid kits heal much more. Usually.
2. You can carry and access your food wherever you go, including in the middle of combat. Eating is either a free action that can be performed while combat is paused, or completed very quickly in real time using a hotkey.
3. You can consume as much food as you need to in one sitting without getting full or throwing up, which implies that the food is digested instantaneously. Furthermore, waste matter from digestion is almost non-existent, and going to the bathroom is hardly ever necessary. This could be due to rapid metabolization, converting most of it into energy and cells for recovery, or it could just be a Bottomless Bladder.
4. It seems that the proteins and iron present in meat are the best medicines around. Chocolate bars and carrots may patch up grazing flesh wounds and small lacerations, but pork chops, whole turkeys, and entire barbeque roasts will stop arterial blood loss, heal punctured lungs and bring you back from the brink of death.
5. Salmonella and food contamination are of no concern to your powerful digestive system. Food found in garbage cans or the crumbling walls of ancient castles infested with evil is just as nutritious as a steak ordered straight out of the local diner. This is not as rigidly adhered to as other points, as some games may feature rotten food that can harm you, and a rarer few may actually have the food you carry spoil if not properly prepared or stored.
6. When drinks are present, they often will restore mana or energy in the same way food restores health.
7. For as long as you're at full health, you don't need to eat at all. Some games will let you eat as much as you want even when you don't need health.

To accommodate the hyperactive metabolism of their characters, it is not rare to see players carry 28 cooked sharks and eat them in the middle of melee combat in less than 30 seconds. Some players even call hurt characters "hungry"; despite an advanced magic system, healing comes from eating.

A corollary to this is the near-universal practice of having vampirism heal the vampire, to the point where health-draining effects are often called "vampirism". In actual vampire myth, bloodsucking had no such effect; vampires only fed on blood as humans eat food. This could have tenuous justification, as their metabolisms aren't being judged by the human standard. A vampire sucking blood to heal himself could make sense, if only because we can't really deny it. Other interpretations depict them as having enhanced metabolisms. The downside is that if they don't eat lots of food often, they begin to starve quickly.

This trope, although wildly exaggerated, is at least roughly based on how healing works in real life. Food's functional purpose is to fuel the body and provide substances that the body cannot synthesize on its own. People are told when they are sick to eat until they're full because a full stomach gives the body more calories and nutrients for repair. This trope also has fewer Unfortunate Implications than having the hero dependent on modern medicines such as pills and morphine to stay functioning, since that draws comparisons with drug abuse. That concern is less pertinent to potions and medicinal herbs because they are perceived as more "old-fashioned" and "natural".

Some games in which you control a vehicle, be it a Mech, a spaceship, or a car have a mechanic equivalent in which picking items as tools, a can of fuel, etc. will instantly repair them more or less, without needing a repair/maintenance crew.

Power-Up Food is the trope when food provides benefits instead of (or in addition to) restoring health. Carnivorous Healing Factor is when this process requires one to chow down on their enemies or other handy creatures in particular.

Also known as Health Food. See also Healing Potion. When food instead recovers magic the trope is Cast from Calories. Contrast Wizard Needs Food Badly, where the food is needed simply to prevent starvation, and Edible Collectible, where it's just for meeting collection objectives or Scoring Points. When a good rest restores health, it's Resting Recovery or Trauma Inn. Invokes Inappropriate Hunger.

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Video Game Examples:

Action-Adventure

• In ANNO: Mutationem, the Corn Juice items provide Ann with instant recovered health instead of using a regenerative effect as Stim Shots.
• Aquaria not only makes food your primary method of healing, but has food that can give you stronger attacks, let you move faster, or even make you invincible. Medicine, meanwhile, only restores HP or cures status. Of course, they are all created by magic.
• In Beyond Good & Evil, Jade and her sidekicks can eat food to restore health, even better since they cannot be interrupted while eating. It is space food, though.
• In Brave Fencer Musashi, the title character could consume mints to reduce fatigue, or food such as bread and oranges to restore health and bincho power. However, since time flows as a seven-day week, milk, bread, and oranges would spoil and restore very little health. The only items that improved over long periods of time were the cheese and the milk, the latter only after going "sour" and getting weaker first. Give it a little longer and it turns into "yoghurt" which is about five times as good as milk.
• Castlevania:
  • The early games have Pot Roast, which looks much like any other eight-bit piece of meat, heal the hero — even if you do find the meat in the walls of a cursed castle that looks hundreds of years old. There's also sconce meat as well as wall meat.
  • Later games, notably the Metroidvania style, started giving you more and more food items, along with more typical healing potions, to round out your diet. The further the games went, the more varied the food items got. Portrait of Ruin has foods like Beef Jerky, Ground Meat, Grapes, Penne Arrabiata, and Cheesecake.
  • Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow and Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow, as well as Portrait of Ruin have rotten food items, and sometimes downright poisonous foods available to be picked up, though these would hurt you to eat them (some to an insane degree; apparently spoiled milk will have you hanging onto life by a thread). The Ghoul soul will let you eat rotten foods and still get healed.
  • The first incidence of unhealthy food in Castlevania appears to be Symphony of the Night's toadstool; wearing something that converts poison damage into healing makes these kind of useful after all (hey, a boost of 1 HP is still technically useful). The peanuts, however, remain a giant pain in the neck no matter how worthwhile it is to catch the things.
• The main health items in Die by the Sword are meat legs, breadsticks, and healing herbs, with healing potions the only drink. They all heal the hero instantly, and since the levels are continuous and segue into each other, and he never relieves himself during the game, this is also an example of Bottomless Bladder.
• In Donkey Kong 64, health is represented by watermelons, divided into four slices. You start with one whole watermelon and buy two more over the course of the game. Health is frequently regained by touching watermelon slices, which are dropped by some enemies and also found in certain boxes. Snakes in the minigame "Teetering Turtle Trouble" regain the energy to spin turtles on their tails when you shoot watermelons into their mouths, making an odd overlap with Edible Ammunition that is actually eaten.
• Dust: An Elysian Tail homages and parodies Castlevania with the "Mysterious Wall Chicken" healing item that commonly appears out of destroyed walls. Other food items are also present to restore health and boost stats, and they usually have humorous descriptions.
• In Goof Troop, cherries and bananas were the healing items.
• Intrepid Izzy: Izzy eats various kinds of foods to restore her health.
• Kid Icarus: Uprising allows you to recover health by picking up food throughout the stages. Lampshaded at one point.
  Palutena: Now, now. I think we can all agree that Pit's not a buzzard. Though I have seen him eat some questionable things off the ground...
  Pit: Floor ice cream gives you health!
• In Legacy of the Wizard, bread is the main healing pickup.
• The Legend of Zelda:
  • Most Zelda games since The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time have milk as one of the earliest healing items you encounter. Later games have soup and, in The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, bee larvae. In The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap, there's a bakery that sells bread that restores your health. The more expensive treats heal you more. Minish Cap is also the first Zelda game since Zelda II: The Adventure of Link to feature a traditional, RPG-style Trauma Inn.
  • Taken to its logical extreme in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, where Link can quickly cook and eat dozens of hearty meals in just a few minutes. This gets some Gameplay and Story Integration: Zelda's diary notes that Link is a Big Eater, and she even started bonding with him in part Through His Stomach.
• In Majin and the Forsaken Kingdom, special fruits heal majin & increase his stats.
• The Metal Slug series usually avoids this due to the player being a One-Hit-Point Wonder. On the other hand, vehicles can be repaired by filling their tanks with gasoline.
• Salt and Sanctuary: Every Creed has their own healing items. The Iron Ones offer the Hearty Roll, which is just as good at healing as any of the other creeds' healing items despite being a seemingly ordinary piece of bread. A justification for this can be found in one of the snippets of worldbuilding in the skill tree, which states that the north has a strong cultural association between baking and physical health and many of their bakers are also healers who bake medical herbs into bread.
• Solatorobo has Red chowing down on meat to replenish his health (and constantly chewing on a Stock Femur Bone). Surprisingly, Red and his Mini-Mecha share a health bar, so eating meat also heals the robot. Or not so surprisingly, once you learn that Red is capable of fusing with Dahak due to Nanomachines.
• Star Fox Adventures: Krystal and Fox can eat Dumbledang Pods and Pukpuk eggs (said by the description to not be dinosaur eggs) for health. With each health container divided into four sections, they can restore up to 2 and 4 sections, respectively. The former can be knocked out of trees, and both can be found in containers, as enemy drops, and, if you're really desperate, in the store. But if you're buying them, you're probably really hurting for health.
• Sydney Hunter and the Curse of the Mayan: One way Sydney can recover lost health is by eating pineapples. You can also purchase meals from the merchants in the game to increase his Life Meter.
• The Wolf and the Waves: Eating mushrooms or bunnies will restore your health.

Adventure Games

• Indiana Jones and His Desktop Adventures has bananas, as well as the Healing Herb Yerba Buena.
• Most of the healing items in Obitus are food like apples, loafs, cherries, etc. Notably, booze has a negative healing value.

Action Games

• The Glutton from Bloodline Champions has an ability called "Eat" which does this.
• In the Ushio and Tora game for the Super Famicom, Ushio regains health by eating rice balls, and Tora by eating hamburgers.
• Viewtiful Joe replenishes hearts by consuming full cheeseburgers that fall out of floating boxes. "Yummy!" There are also bigger value meals that include a double cheeseburger, fries, and a drink. "Mmm! Real meal!"

Beat 'em Up

• Armored Warriors has an interesting variation, where finding oil cans, batteries, spanners and wrenches will immediately restore the health of your Humongous Mecha, basically turning it into Hyperactive Maintenance.
• Final Fight infamously had fully cooked turkeys pop out of oil drums. Other beat 'em ups like Streets of Rage would follow suit.
• God Hand, being made in the mold of the old-fashioned Beat 'em Up, has fruit for all your healing needs. In order of increasing effectiveness, there are cherries, oranges, bananas, and strawberries. In addition, pizza increases your God Hand meter when purchased from the game's store, smoothies increase your maximum health, and sushi lets you use more attacks in your combo. It quenches his thirst and keeps him full in a desert environment; eating chicken legs and meaty foods only serves to make a man thirsty.
• Jurassic Park Warpath had random animals around to eat.
• Kenka Banchou has two meters for health, one is the health meter which is self-explanatory, and the stamina meter, which determines your maximum health. Eating food ranging from baked goods to box lunches will restore your health while drinks ranging from milk to strong tea restores stamina. Even more potent are the energy drinks which heals both meters.
• In the Like a Dragon games, Kiryu (or whoever else you're currently playing as) can restore his health by eating food, be it take-out from a fast food joint or sandwiches and booze bought from the local convenience store — which happens instantly, so he can eat a sandwich in the middle of a battle. However, food items are much weaker compared to medicine yet take as much space in your inventory, making them inefficient. It's also possible to sit down in a restaurant and order a proper meal, which gives experience points on top of restoring health. You can typically earn an upgrade that lets you play this totally straight, too, letting you pack away the entire menu of a restaurant while at full health.
• MadWorld, the Spiritual Successor to God Hand, lets Jack eat onions for health.
• In Mystical Fighter, eating sushi is the way to restore your Life Meter.
• Ninja Clowns: The ninja clowns can regain health by eating food like pizza, hot dogs, and milkshakes. You get them by beating enemies.
• In Primal Rage, it was your human followers who provided the health.
• In River City Ransom, the heroes every so often visit shopping malls where you can buy everything from books (to learn new abilities) to food (with which you can heal yourself and up your stats). This trope is carried to its esophageally unpleasant extreme, as practically every sit-down restaurant sells the plates the food comes on as part of the meal, which the hero promptly eats all in one gulp. In the Japanese version, it turns out that the stamina-raising items are entire bags of high-quality rice. Now picture the heroes eating an entire bag's worth of rice with natto.
• In Scott Pilgrim vs. The World: The Game, Scott and company can enter fast-food restaurants for a quick refill of health.
• Shuihuzhuan: Liangshan Yingxiong has fruit baskets, sticks of roast, a whole chicken, and even ginseng that you can consume for restoring health.
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Arcade Game, its sequels Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Manhattan Project and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Turtles in Time. Like its platformer predecessor, slices or whole pizzas are available to renew health.

Fighting Games

• Done in a very unusual fashion in the Wii version of Punch-Out!!, in which Doc Louis eating a chocolate bar in-between rounds causes the player to instantly regain stamina. In the boss fight against him in Doc Louis' Punch-Out!!, he can also regain stamina by eating a chocolate bar in the middle of the match (the player can stop him by punching it out of his hand, but there will be consequences.)
• Food in Super Smash Bros. heals very little (1-12%). To offset this, Party Balls sometimes drop a lot of it. Maxim Tomatoes heal 50% damage (100% in the first game). Also explicitly (as of Super Smash Bros. for Nintendo 3DS and Wii U, at least) follows Point 3 in the list above: the apple, for instance, does not heal as much as the turkey dinner.
• Tekken 3 for the Playstation 1 has Tekken Force Mode, which is sort of like a Final Fight/Streets of Rage-type sidescroller, but done in 3D. You can eat whole cooked chickens to regain most of your health. The best part of that, though, is the voice sample that plays when you eat one. If you remember the announcer, you remember it. "CHICKEN."
• If playing as or fighting against Paprika in Them's Fightin' Herds, fighters can recover health by eating the leftover apples and broccoli still on the ground she uses in a few of her attacks.

First-Person Shooter

• The health items in Action Doom 2: Urban Brawl are all various types of food, from soda to chickens, which recover varying amounts of health. Like the entire game, it's a homage to beat 'em ups from the 1990s.
• Ashes 2063 exaggerates but also justifies this. Scav can eat all sorts of food that's more than 70 years out of date, all of it instantly giving back 2 health, and which he'll say at one point tastes just fine to him. The doctor in Michonne Circle later states in Ashes Afterglow that the ability to stomach large quantities of old and irradiated food is a consistent mutation among scavengers.
• BioShock:
  • In BioShock, there are a number of comestibles that will restore your health and EVE meters, but only by a very small amount. Eating snacks such as potato chips and cream-filled cakes gives you health, while drinking coffee gives you EVE, and eating a "pep bar" gives you a smidgen each of health and EVE. Meanwhile, smoking cigarettes will give you a bit of EVE at the cost of some health, while drinking alcohol will give you a bit of health at the cost of some EVE. The gene tonic Extra Nutrition will give you more health from consumables and Booze Hound causes you to gain EVE instead of losing it when drinking booze. There is, however, a mild disincentive to drinking alcohol for health—drink too much in too short a time and the corners of the screen will become fuzzy and your movements will become drunken wobbles for a minute or two.
  • BioShock 2 superficially expands the set of consumable items, adding not only more mundane food items like canned goods and cola but vitamins, aspirin, fresh water, and something called "Doc Hollcroft's Cure-All", which restores both health and EVE despite being, as an audio diary on the website reveals, a placebo.
  • BioShock Infinite expands eating even more as you no longer hold medkits anymore. Food is far easier to find, even in illogical places such as toilets and trash cans. It is to such an extent that one of the major jokes around Infinite is casting Booker as an extreme glutton just eating everything and anything he can get his hands on. Which, if the ending is any indication, might actually be canon in some way!
    I have to eat this to get my health up, or I'm going to die!
• Breakdown has you find rations sitting around on the ground and you can buy soda from vending machines. Noticeably, you need to hold still to consume them, and given the immersion the game boasts, you can see the character bring the food up to his face and eat it.
• Deathless Hyperion gives you food like sandwiches, toast, cheesecake and the like to replenish your health, never mind they've been left exposed for who knows how long in a virus-laden space station.
• In Duke Nukem 3D, Duke can regain lost health not only from obvious health power-ups like first aid kits but also by urinating into toilets (up to 10%) or by taking drinks from sources of water, which gives back health at a rate of 1% per sip. You can even combine these two by smashing the toilet after you're done with it. If you're really desperate and have lots of time, you can get to 100% health this way even if you're down to your last hit point.
• Extermination Day, a fan-made campaign for Doom II, allows you to recover small amounts of health by eating food lying around in the levels and drinking water like Duke Nukem above.
• Taken to a ridiculous length in Far Cry 2. Any bottle of water will restore your health completely. Even if you've been hit with a rocket and pummeled by a machine gun, a single bottle of water brings you back to full health just as effectively as a shot of morphine into the arm.
• In the first Half-Life, soda cans obtained from vending machines can heal one point of health each. This also applies to Black Mesa, where consuming the soda is now accompanied by a hearty slurping noise.
• Prey (2017): Food and water from drinking fountains or taps restores a small amount of health, some restore psi points.
• Primal Carnage: Humans can heal themselves with first-aid kits scattered around the map (or dropped by the Commando), but dinosaurs obviously can't use those, so instead heal themselves by feeding on carcasses scattered around the map. Dinosaurs with biting attacks will also heal a small amount when they bite a human player (implying the dinosaurs are ripping chunks out of them), while Tyrants replenish a significant portion of their health after eating a human.
• Redneck Rampage has pork rinds, beer, whiskey, moon pies (Or Cow Pies depending on which version of the game you've gotten), moonshine, and GooGoo Clusters. What stands out though is that both snack foods and booze have a meter on their own. Beer and Whiskey reduces enemy damage but drinking too much makes the player harder to control and blurs the screen before passing out. Eating snack foods (only Cow/Moon pies can be carried) reduces the alcohol meter but increases the gut meter, and when the gut meter gets too full, Leonard becomes flatulent, alerting the enemy of the player's presence. Hitting the Piss key gradually eliminates borderline all excessive alcohol past the third part of the gauge^note enough that a piece of Moon pie is enough to get Leonard back under control and crouching on top of the toilet bowl empties the Gut meter instantly. Drinking XXX Moonshine empties both meters after the effect wears off.
• Rise of the Triad has the minor health pickups "Monk Meal" and "Priest Porridge". Humorously, you can heat them up by shooting at them with your missile weapons so they heal more points.
• In Shadow of the Wool Ball, health can be replenished by fruit (described simply as "food"), although there are also medikit pickups.
• In Shaw's Nightmare, there are various foods like maize, bread, and meat that restore your health.
• Team Fortress 2:
  • The game gives the Heavy a "weapon" called the Sandvich. The Heavy has an unlimited supply of them and they restore 300 health per use, though the Heavy gets so enthralled with eating his delicious edible device that he becomes vulnerable to attack while eating it. He can also throw it on the ground (complete with a plate), which heals whoever picks it up for 50% of their max health. Instantly. Apparently stepping on the Sandvich is good enough when it comes to healing.
  • Later updates would give Heavy even more types of food items, some even giving him buffs. There is the Dalokohs Bar (increases Heavy's max health by 50), the Fishcake (a reskin of that), the Robo-Sandvich (a reskin of the normal Sandvich), the Buffalo Steak Sandvich (allows Heavy to deal Mini-Crits, but locks him to his melee weapon for 16 seconds) and the Second Banana (heals less health, but restocks far quicker than the Sandvich).
  • Scout also has two drinks that are full of sugar, caffeine, and radiation that, when drunk, take effect immediately and give him the ability to dodge all damage or have guaranteed critical hits (in exchange for being more vulnerable).
  • The Halloween event maps and party/Pyrovision modes reskin the standard health pickups as candy and cake, respectively. The "medieval mode" map Degroot Keep reskins the 50% health pickup (the only one built into the map) as a leg of lamb or something, though strangely enough, the 20% health pickups that are programmed to spawn on every successful kill are still standard pill bottles.
• Wolfenstein 3-D lets you recover by eating the dog food left for the attack dogs, or the chicken-and-vegetable dinners which have been conveniently left all over the prison floor. Additionally, if the player's health drops below 10%, you can regain 1% of health by ingesting pools of blood mixed with presumably human bones. Its modernised sequel, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, features "hot meals" of turkey in addition to "cold meals" of cheese and cold cuts, the former of which heal more than the latter, though this time they're actually on tables. After the 2009 game switched to Regenerating Health, Wolfenstein: The New Order went back to a health counter and brought back food to heal small amounts, including allowing you to temporarily overcharge your health above the maximum by eating food items. There is also an Armour mechanic in this game, that operates on basically identical terms to Health, only instead of eating tons of food, you're instead wearing like 15 helmets or several random pieces of metal that came off an exploding Humongous Mecha to slowly increase your Armour amount.
• Zombies TC, a Game Mod for Doom, replaces health bonuses and stimpacks with candy bars, hamburgers, and sodas.

Hack and Slash

• Battle Axe have you regaining health by eating food, and the game will even announce it for you. "Found some chicken!"
• The Atari game Dandy (a predecessor to Gauntlet) uses food as health replenishment pickups; it's even called simply "health food" in the manual.
• In Dragon's Crown, food drops in dungeons can restore health and even exceed your maximum health when eaten.
• The Dynasty Warriors series uses meat and steamed buns as its healing foods of choice. Coincidentally, Zhuge Liang (a playable character) is traditionally credited with inventing the mantou, a plain steamed bun with no filling (these days; it may have had meat originally). In addition, alcohol fills your Limit Break meter.
• Fist of the North Star: Ken's Rage features things such as bread and meat for healing, and water to restore the necessary energy meter for the series' signature moves.
• Gauntlet gives us the immortal five words: "[Color] [character] needs food badly!"
• Muramasa: The Demon Blade characters can heal themselves with food, which also grants one of the resources used to forge new swords. Each item adds a certain amount to the Fullness Gauge and you can't eat again until the gauge is empty. Certain dishes cooked outside of combat double as Power-Up Food and restaurant dishes look really good.
• In No More Heroes, opening your fridge and staring at all the food in it seems to offer a full refill of health, even if you never need it outside of missions. You can also break open purple boxes and eat slices and entire pixelated pizzas inside them to restore your health. Your bladder is not bottomless, however — you save your game by going to the bathroom. Of course, the fridge is actually useless, as it can only be used during the free-roaming part of the game, a time when Travis cannot be hurt anyways. Also included in Travis Strikes Again: No More Heroes, in which you can find a couple of ramen stalls on each level, where your character can calmly sit to eat. This not only refills your health, but also your special attack meter, and even the battery of your weapon, somehow. You can then find a very detailed review of each ramen in Travis' blog after getting it.
• Odin Sphere characters can restore health by eating food. Potions are better in battle since eating takes several seconds, but food grants Experience Points for increasing HP.
• In Samurai Warriors, sister series to Dynasty Warriors, it's dango (small rice flour balls on a skewer) and nigiri (rice shaped in a triangle and half-wrapped with a thin sheet of pressed seaweed). Just like in Dynasty Warriors, alcohol fills your Limit Break meter.
• Sengoku Basara, as Capcom's version of Samurai Warriors, also uses onigiri and sake as healing items. Crates of rice fill both the health and the Basara gauges.
• In Unworthy, consuming Rotten Flesh and Burnt Flesh provides minor healing. It's never outright stated whose flesh it is, but given that Burnt Flesh's inventory icon is a very human-looking arm with a protruding bone, and that you can loot this from the enemies, many of whom are at least formerly human, the implications are unpleasant.
• For the food part of it, Warriors Orochi uses peaches.

Massive Multiplayer Online Games

• In The Elder Scrolls Online, healing is usually reserved for potions and healing magic, while food gives buffs to stamina, health and/or magicka. The buff, however, is active immediately (there's an animation for eating, but it doesn't have to finish and can even be done in the middle of battle) and can be done as fast as you can. The only time when your character will actually get sick is during quests.
• In Everquest, your character required food and drink, or your character did not regenerate Health (food) and Mana (water). Certain foods, however, provided statistic boosts if you place them in the top slot of your inventory, although not if you actually eat it.
• In Flyff, food you buy from the NPC can be used every 2 seconds, food that drops and isn't sold once per second, and it indeed heals you. This means you can eat 30 hot dogs or candies, or 60 glasses of orange juice or ice cream cakes (or meat salads, although they no longer drop as of v18) a minute. Pills can be used every ten seconds. Then there's Remantis Lacotte, a food that fully heals your HP and has no cooldown whatsoever. Balance, shmalance!
• Mabinogi has this. Your stamina, which affects your ability to fight, use combat skills, or use other skills, is affected by your hunger. There are potions in-game to restore stamina, but the amount they restore is strongly affected by your hunger level. The more hungry you are, the lower your maximum stamina. There's also the issue that using too many potions at once will give you an overdose and you lose health/mp/stamina depending on the trait. Eating certain food affects your weight, either gaining or losing depending on the food.
• Eating a mere apple in MooMoo.io heals 20 HP out of a 100. Eating a cookie, available at Age 3, heals 45. Eating Cheese, potentially available at Age 7, will immediately heal 30 HP, and 10 more for five additional seconds, which will also immediately override any poisoning.
• Food and booze always heal you in Nexus Clash, no matter what kind of food you ate. The amount of hit points restored this way is tiny compared to the losses from most wounds though, so more ridiculous uses of this trope only arise when someone is trying to make it ridiculous.
• Ragnarok Online while being a normal fantasy MMO with the use of potions for healing does also have a good deal of food in it too. Below, say, level 40 meat is a more economical way to regain health than the cheapest potions if you can manage to carry the weight and while not being particularly useful you can still eat apples, bananas, or carrots (including juice if you've got the bottles for them) to fill your HP bar and oranges fill your MP. There is no limit to how much you can eat.
• Runescape is especially stupid about this: eating 28 whole sharks in 30 seconds is not only non-fatal, it's actually healthy. This was lampshaded by Jagex in a Facebook post. In contrast, a bad kebab can kill you if you're not lucky. And your character has a bad habit of eating pointy fish like lobsters and swordfish fast enough that it should do at least as much damage to you as the enemy's sword.
• Even used in Star Trek Online, however food heals over time (a short enough time that it still qualifies for this trope) and can only be consumed out of battle. Still, it often leaves one wondering just exactly why that Klingon had an Ice Cream Sundae in the middle of battle, or why the Borg even have food at all.
• In Thelast.io, healing is done through either eating apples (which restore 30 HP), or steaks (which restore the entire life bar, but take twice as long to consume, and the player must stand still during that entire time).
• World of Warcraft:
  • Eating food restores health, while drinking various liquids restores mana. A few restore both or grant other effects like temporary stat bonuses or a chance to burp flame in combat. Eating food and drinking liquids takes place over time and requires your character to sit and do nothing but eat and drink while drinking potions is an instant effect with an animation. Note that healing magic also exists in the game, and classes without mana obviously have no need to drink; thus, the need for these items varies depending on your character.
  • The Burning Crusade expansion pack hangs a lampshade over this, with an NPC (named Griftah) selling trinkets that (supposedly) enable the player to "magically" heal wounds via consuming food or drink, "swim in any water", or "return from the dead", among other things. For extra hilarity, he was banished from Shattrath for one patch cycle while the authorities investigated him for fraud.
  • Similar to the BioShock example above, drinking too much alcohol in too short a time gets you drunk. How quickly you get drunk depends on the level of alcohol in the drink. After getting drunk, your screen becomes blurry, your character wobbles and walks in the wrong direction, and everything you type into the chat log sounds like slurred speech... from a drunk. And don't even try to fly while drunk...
  • Get too drunk and mobs look to be a few levels lower than they actually are, what's the tuff guy? That 30-foot giant wants to pick a fight and you're the same level? Sure, go for it.

Platform Games

• Beer serves as the health pickup in The Angry Video Game Nerd Adventures and its sequel, and your life gauge is measured in beer bottles.
• In Bravoman, sushi, ramen, and onigiri restore the life gauge.
• Bubble and Squeak: Eating food raises Bubble's health by one unit.
• Bug has "BUUUUUUUUUUUUG JUUUUUUUUUUUUICE!!!" An energy drink that instantly refills all of Bug's hitpoints as soon as he collects one.
• Caveman Warriors: The Caveman Warriors can regain health by eating various foods.
• Clunky Hero: Food and drinks are how Rufus regains health. How much he regains varies from item to item.
• Conker in Conker's Bad Fur Day has health in the form of pieces of chocolate. Minor injuries make him lose one piece, major ones make him lose them all. By the time he's invited to a creepy vampire's mansion to have dinner, he gratefully accepts, glad to eat something besides large pieces of floating, antigravity chocolate.
• In Cool Spot, the spot keeps itself healthy by drinking 7-Up. Which seems strange if you think about it too long.
• Crossbow Warrior - The Legend of William Tell: William Tell can regain health by eating wedges of cheese.
• In Dragon's Wake, the player character is a young dragon that eats the bodies of his enemies to heal his wounds — even in the middle of combat.
• The early DOS Duke Nukem games have cola as a health item, along with a turkey leg. Shooting it upgrades it to a full turkey. Duke Nukem II has an interesting spin, as one health powerup is a live chicken that moves fairly quickly. If you're quick enough to shoot it with your laser, it roasts the bird, and the resulting meal gives you double the health the regular chicken does.
• Dynamite Headdy does this with bananas. "Yum yum!"
• In the Earthworm Jim series, health is normally restored point by point by collecting atom-looking things; in the second game, however, there is a "chip butty" item (a real British sandwich of steak fries and mayo on white bread) that takes your health to 200%.
• Ecco the Dolphin has fish for this purpose, rather naturally.
• In E.V.O.: Search for Eden, food doesn't just heal you, it literally allows you to evolve into new forms.
• Ghostbusters (1990) for the Sega Genesis has Gyoza available at the item store to refill your health between missions. Peking Duck can be bought and stored in your inventory to heal in the middle of a job.
• Ghoulboy: Thulgar can regain health by eating food.
• Haunted Halloween 85: Donny can regain health by eating pieces of candy corn. Same thing in the sequel.
• In Jackie Chan's Action Kung Fu, Jackie could gain life points by eating "Energy Bowls."
• In Jazz Jackrabbit, Jazz, Spaz, and Lori can replenish their health by eating carrots. These also give them temporary immunity to anything health-damaging.
• Kirby:
  • The early games have Pep Brew (partial healing) and Maxim Tomatoes (full healing). Later games have various food items that give back varying amounts of health. And gods help you if he eats Hyper Candy!
  • When meat appears, it's the most potent healing item below the Maxim Tomato.
  • Kirby and the Forgotten Land's figurine gallery includes figs of every food item in the game, showcasing all thirty-six of them!
  • "Delicious" became a minor meme on Something Awful Let's Play runs of Kirby games whenever Kirby would down a healing item.
  • Arguably in a series where the main character considers everything food, it makes sense that "actual" food items would have this sort of effect.
• Kyle & Lucy: Wonderworld: Collecting cherries will restore your health.
• The Lion King: Simba eats beetles, in a nice nod to Timon and Pumbaa's diet in the movie. Some are deadly, though.
• The Lost Vikings has tomatoes, carrots, and various meats as healing items. Each of them heals 1 hit point, except for the giant meat slice, which heals 2.
• Although N does not have food, it does explain the ninja as having a hyperactive metabolism, thus explaining the 90-second time limit on all levels. This metabolism is handled a different way, however: collecting gold grants 2 extra seconds to the time limit apiece, explained as a rush of joy that contributes to well-being.
• In Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, a drink of water can cure you of various slash and stab wounds.
• In Psychonauts, you can use Pyrokinesis to roast squirrels, which will heal you slightly when eaten. This is removed in the sequel, but in exchange, you can now purchase Psi Pops: lollipops that restore your mental energy (i.e., health) when used.
• Shovel Knight: Health is recovered via carrots, apples, chicken, and fish. Shovel Knight can extend his health bar with meals cooked by the Gastronomer, while King Knight extends his with hearty meat pies baked by his mom.
• Parodied in Sonic 2 XL, in which all the golden rings in each stage are replaced by fried onion rings. Sonic digests them instantly — but with every five rings he eats, he gains weight and loses mobility. If Sonic gets fat enough, he's completely immobilized and soon dies of a heart attack.
• Sonic Unleashed has the player buying food from vendors around the world and feeding them to either Sonic or Chip. It's a little off the trope, as Sonic does not gain health from doing so (Day stages operate under traditional Sonic logic of holding onto rings to survive, while the Werehog has a more conventional health bar refilled by other means), but instead gives him experience points to go towards upgrading the abilities of both forms. The trope kicks in when it becomes clear there is no limit, and Sonic can just scarf down a chili dog, some jelly, two apples, a bowl of elasticated ice cream, a massive steak, a mega-massive Hero Sandwich, and much more besides, without issue. Must be all that running. Chip can also be fed these food items without penalty, for a little description of how they taste as well as making him like Sonic more — and at least in his case, his Big Eater status is justified, seeing as he's the Light Gaia and all.
• Super Mario Bros.: Super Mushrooms makes Mario become twice as tall (or restores him to normal size) and Fire Flowers let him throw fireballs. In the RPGs, this is played even more straight though, with mushrooms and other various food items certain chefs can cook healing various amounts of damage, and odd items such as a golden leaf still healing a minute amount of damage.
• In Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1989), slices of pizza restore some of a turtle's health, and whole pizzas provide full recovery.
• Toe Jam And Earl has a wide variety of food items that heal you to varying degrees, generally corresponding to the tastiness or richness of the food (e.g., a hot fudge sundae will heal you more than a bowl of cereal). It also features Poison Mushroom-type items that take the form of rotten foods, or a few stereotypically unpleasant "healthy" foods, like cabbage.
• Wario Land: Garlic is apparently the heal-all substance for Wario, even when your source of garlic is roughly equivalent to 'beat up enemy by shaking them to make them drop a three-foot by three-foot clove of garlic that heals instantly'. Garlic is more or less the Evil Counterpart to Mushrooms, it seems.

Roguelike

• In Dead Cells, you can find health pickups in small and large sizes, and the game lets you customize what they look like based on your "dietary preferences". Some of these options include meat, fruit, bread, and entrails, and a few non-edible ones like medkits.
• In Dicey Dungeons, apples are the most effective way to heal a character, but there are a limited amount, only being found on dungeon maps or in shops.
• All food, when consumed, will heal 1 HP a turn when consumed in Dungeons of Dredmor and different foods take different lengths of time to "digest" unless you are a Vampire (in which you gain the ability to eat enemy corpses for health) or a Vegan (in which you are penalized for eating meat, eggs, and dairy).
• In Our Darker Purpose, Cordy heals 5 Health through eating Cookies, and 20 health with Juice Boxes. There are also plenty of items and perks that give her additional boosts when consuming Juice Boxes.
• Tinned food is your main healing item in Strafe.

Role-Playing Games

• In Attack the Light, Cookie Cats (ice cream sandwiches) and Together Breakfasts are healing items. Given that hit points are 'Harmony' (it represents how well the Gems are 'in sync' with the battle, and how well they can avoid blows that might poof them) and Steven can also heal with encouragement, it's likely that this is because it Tastes Like Friendship.
• Baten Kaitos uses food as healing items. One interesting change is that the food here does spoil, and cleverly the rotten food can be used to damage or poison baddies. Averted in Origins, where the only healing items are potions, bandages, and magical artifacts.
• In A Blurred Line, food snacks like a Bag of Chips, a Cold Sandwhich, or Fresh Pita act as healing items, while Bottled Water and Cheap Wine restores SP. They're so effective at it that when dedicated healing items appear late in the game, they end up practically unneeded.
• Boktai:
  • All entries have food as healing items. Starting with Zoktai (Boktai 2), all food items have a freshness meter that wears down over time. At least in the early going, fruits and meat have a strong effect but run the risk of growing stale (which can still be consumed but have a much weaker effect and make you sick, messing up the screen whenever you move), whereas potions have a lesser effect but never go bad.
  • Lunar Knights expounds on this further by allowing you to "process" items based on the local weather. Carrying meat around on a hot, low-humidity day causes it to dry out, for example, which not only makes it more effective but also prevents it from going bad in this new state. Likewise, soda can freeze into popsicles when the temperature goes sub-zero. Chocolate also melts when enough time passes, and as it does so, it combines with whatever item you have in the inventory slot below it: most items only end up producing chocolate-covered versions of the original item which would never go bad (though all chocolate sealed items had the same appearance so you would have to remember what item was in what chocolate blob), but some of them become a lot more effective this way, such as fruit and milk (the latter turning into milk chocolate).
• Chaos Rings uses various types of Chocolate as healing items, which makes some sense. Chocolate heals a little, while Gateau Chocolate heals a lot, which makes less sense.
• While Chrono Trigger doesn't have food items that restore health, eating a meal in Guardia Castle will allow you to fully restore your HP, MP, or both. Drinking "special water" in 65 Million BC does the same. Also contains an inversion, to emphasize what a Crapsack World the After the End time period is like, you are always given the message: "But you're still hungry..." after being healed by the machines. This gets a Shout-Out in Chrono Cross.
• In Contact, eating food heals wounds somehow, but there's also a meter that tells how full your character's stomach is — eat too much too quickly and you won't have room for anything else for a while. This even roughly corresponds to the type of food you've eaten; a whole roast chicken will take a lot longer to digest than a cup of coffee. Moreover, certain foods will give status bonuses while they're still being digested: meats will give strength and stamina bonuses, fish will give intelligence bonuses, and soda gives you a speed bonus.
• Danganronpa RPG: All of the items that heal HP are food, and drinks heal SP. Most of them are very strange foods such as chocolate chip-covered jerky or alcohol-free wine. The Limit Break bar is filled by biscuits.
• Deus Ex Universe:
  • Deus Ex includes soy food, soda cans, candy bars, and at least three kinds of alcohol as various small but noticeable health restoration, on top of actual medical equipment. It's explained that Denton's nanites process the food instantly. A bottle of wine or vial of illegal drugs (that do not increase your health), for instance, would have your targeting reticule wavering in a circle for about ten seconds, with more amplifying the effect. You can also apparently repair four crippled appendages, a couple gunshot wounds to the head, and a severe chest wound by drinking from a water fountain. Or you could, if the water fountains didn't run out of water after a few seconds.
  • Deus Ex: Invisible War does much the same, but homogenizes all the forms of food into one type of item regardless of what it looks like.
  • In Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Adam gains back not health, but energy by eating protein bars specifically designed to be ultra-efficient when consumed by augmented humans. There is also alcohol, which increases his health above the normal maximum of 100, up to 200, along with painkillers - as such, this could be considered as due to alcohol's anesthetic effect, but it also works just as well for healing from near-death as boosting it above 100.
• In Dex, Food and the E-Drinks will heal Dex a little when consumed.
• Divine Divinity has foods to eat, some which can heal, others might temporarily increase your stats or other things. You can eat only a limited amount of them in a certain period of time, though, since the character will complain that s/he's full if you eat too much.
• Dubloon uses various meats as healing items that can be eaten even in the heat of battle to instantly restore health, even if it's a huge turkey leg.
• The Elder Scrolls:
  • Played straight throughout the series, where it is possible to gulp down hundreds of pounds of food/alchemical ingredients and gallons worth of drinks/potions with no ill effect (unless the item you are eating is designed to have an ill effect, as certain items like some fungi are meant to be brewed into poisons instead). This is actually beneficial for Level Grinding your Alchemy skill, with the in-universe justification that sampling the ingredients increases your knowledge of their effects once brewed into a potion. In addition to actual food and beverages, the series, at various points, allows you to eat precious gemstones, metal ores, chunks of scrap metal, raw Organ Drops, and otherworldly substances such as Ectoplasm, vampire dust, and Daedric body parts. Yum!
  • If you abuse the Fortify Intelligence Alchemy trick in Morrowind, then make a potion that recovers health, it is possible to make a potion that recovers more health that you have as a maximum for a ridiculously long period of time. Until it wears off, you'll be able to survive anything that doesn't instantly kill you in one hit and still have full health.
  • In Skyrim, this trope is played straight, as all food now restores health. This is especially true at the beginning of the game as food is easily obtainable for free, while the player likely hasn't accumulated enough stuff to make the food's poor weight-to-healing ratio a problem. Because food is eaten instantaneously from the menu screen, many players will do things such as ingesting 30 entire wheels of cheese in the heat of battle.
• Epic Battle Fantasy: Starting from the third game, restoratives, buffing items and stat-increasing items are all food. Coffee can bring people back from the dead. Characters will occasionally make remarks when you feed them, such as Natalie worrying that she'll gain weight.
• Eternal Sonata has cookies, floral medicines, and clover. The various kinds of Cookies each heal one character a set amount of HP, the different Floral medicines each heal a set percentage of one character's maximum HP, and the different Clovers each heal a set amount of all characters' HP.
• Etrian Odyssey V: Beyond the Myth has an entire separate item tab for food, of which there's a large variety. Food can be fed to your party members to restore HP and/or TP and can be cooked or used for recipes to restore even more. However, food cannot be used in-battle, nor can it be sold for ental.
• Fable:
  • In Fable, a player will think nothing of eating a hundred carrots in the middle of a battle.
  • In Fable II, food items heal and higher quality foods drop experience, and are generally cheaper than potions, but also affect the hero's look and status. Meats are cheaper and have better benefits but cause the hero to get fat and corrupt, whereas assorted fruits, veggies, and tofu are generally more expensive but keep the hero thin and pure.
• In The Fall: Last Days of Gaia, eating various foods will heal characters a bit, though not as much as proper medicaments. Interestingly, water is far more efficient at healing and can directly compete with some medicaments.
• Fallout:
  • The early games humorously point out that the pre-War food you find is suspiciously well preserved. Presumably it is practically indestructible, being absolutely jammed full of preservatives and then irradiated.
  • Nuka-Cola heals twice as much when it's Ice-Cold.
  • You can actually get a perk called Fast Metabolism, it halves your poison and RAD resistance stats, but you get twice the health boost from food and medicine.
  • In Fallout 2, you get to be fully healed when you consume an omelet in Rose's Bed and Breakfast. Of course, it's not an ordinary omelet — it's made from Deathclaw eggs. Also available, if only peripherally related, was the chance to poison yourself by attempting to break the record for most "Brahmin fries" consumed. The scene is rather funny, but one would expect a survivor in a post-nuclear wasteland to not be picky about his protein sources.
  • In Fallout 3, drinking water and eating food restores your health, even if said food is 200 years old. You do have to worry about the food and water being radioactive, though that is rarely a serious concern anyway since there are lots of anti-radiation meds and doctors that can heal radiation. However, food and drink provide quite a small amount of health, providing from 5 to 20 points in a game where it is not uncommon to have a total of about 300 hit points, meaning you require a full meal to heal moderately. It's much better to use stimpaks for healing, especially as they have no weight, as opposed to food items.
  • Food in Fallout: New Vegas becomes a lot more useful than in Fallout 3 as it heals you over time rather than instantly and the effects can be stacked with a wide variety of food you'll find in the Mojave (and even cook if your Survival skill is high enough!) And since stimpaks have become rarer and more expensive, food will be your main source of health for a good portion of the game. Also in Hardcore Mode, you need to regularly eat, drink and sleep to stay alive.
  • In Fallout 4, food is more useful in the early game when you have low maximum health, as stimpaks now heal a percentage of total health instead of a fixed amount (this percentage can be increased through perks), not to mention that stimpaks are somewhat more rare than before. You still have to worry about radiation in the food though, which is even more of a concern now that radiation damage directly decreases max health instead of being tracked separately (fortunately, perks can reduce or eliminate radiation from food and water), and RadAways are somewhat rarer as well. Survival Mode downplays this by having food restore HP much more gradually, in addition to averting Trauma Inn and requiring the player to eat, drink, and sleep to stave off debuffs and death.
• Faraway Story allows consumption of food and potions to instantly recover health, but doing so requires Cost Points to prevent this feature from being spammed.
• In Haven (2020), food items containing an ingredient with healing properties will heal the protagonists a moderate amount when consumed.
• Eating in and out of combat recovers HP in The Huntress Of The Hollow.
• The Legend of Heroes: Trails: Characters have no limit to how much of the Power-Up Food they can eat overall while doing it instantly in their turns, even when the amount they ate is the equivalent of multiple meals.
• In Mega Man Legends, Mega Man Volnutt can get vended soda and guzzle it down to restore his hit points.
• In Monkey Hero, slices of peach pie restore 8 peaches of health. Mushrooms fully restore your health and can double as an Auto-Revive.
• Mother:
  • Food is the sole variety of healing item in EarthBound (1994). The more expensive foods heal better, and you can buy condiments that increase their effects — if the combination is bad, such as hamburgers and sugar, it doesn't heal much; if it's good, such as fries and ketchup, it is very effective.
  • While healing foods already existed in RPGs, they were usually treated as more of a depleting resource, as inherited from Western RPGs, or only healed a small amount. Due to its strong focus on their use, EarthBound Beginnings is theorized to be the Trope Codifier for food as standard healing items, at least for the genre. Other Eastern RPGs were streamlining out several resource management parts, and so edibles found their niche.
  • While we're on the topic, Ness and friends are perfectly fine with eating food they find in garbage cans.
  • The character Poo recovers drastically less HP when eating "western" foods compared to Ness, Paula, and Jeff, which is explained as him not being used to the taste. Poo doesn't get a bonus when eating "eastern" foods, though. He's also the only character that can make any real use from bottles of water (which restore PP. Ness and Paula only recover 6 from the bottles, and Jeff has no PP to restore.)
  • To top it all off, cups of noodles bring you back from the dead, or at least from being a ghost. (However, regular cups of noodles exist too.)
  • Mother 3 also deserves mention. If you keep a bottle of fresh milk in your inventory for a while, it becomes rotten and heals an insignificant amount of health. If you keep it around even longer, though, it turns into yogurt, one of the best early healing items. Additionally, one of the game's status ailments is nausea, which prevents the afflicted character from healing with food items because they don't feel like eating.
• Several of the healing items in the Neptunia series are energy drinks, which actually boost metabolism. A Show Within a Show infomercial in the third game has Neptune mention one of the high-end ones is so powerful it'll give you the runs and might be addicting, only to be shoved off stage while Nepgear awkwardly insists there's no side effects at all.
• In Odin Sphere, food doesn't just give you hit points, it gives you experience points (to increase your HP level; attack power is leveled up through different methods). Food items do take various lengths of time to digest, but these lengths can be measured in seconds.
• In OMORI, characters eat various sweets and junk food to heal themselves. Completely averted in the Faraway Town segments, where food items barely heal your party members. Instead, the player must rely on bandages and first aid kits.
• Operencia: The Stolen Sun has a hostile example, as the Giant Spiders can eat heavily wounded allies during combat (including other spiders) to get instantly healed, gain plenty of extra health and become much larger and stronger.
• Medicine is used to heal in Parasite Eve 2, but refilling MP requires spring water. Water: It will make your mitochondria heal faster! Don't forget your delicious Coca-Cola. For some reason, a bag of artificial blood solution is a full restore of both attributes.
• Phantasy Star I uses cola and hamburger as the healing items. This probably didn't work, since every Phantasy Star game afterwards changes healing items to some sort of sci-fi-themed medicine.
• Pokémon:
  • In Pokémon Gold and Silver and beyond, there are various berries with various healing effects (restoring HP, curing paralysis, curing a burn, etc.). They can be used immediately on your Pokémon, or held by them for when they're needed (using a held item in battle does not use up a turn). Ruby/Sapphire and beyond adds Berry farming as a mechanic, letting a Trainer with a green thumb save money on healing items by going organic.
  • The games also have Vending Machines in various places, which sell Fresh Water, Soda Pop, and Lemonade ("Delicious Water", "Psycho Soda", and "Mix au Lait" in Japanese, respectively). Other NPCs sell Moomoo Milk, either by the bottle or by the dozen. All of these restore a Pokémon's HP, and indeed are more cost-effective than the various Healing Potions sold at every Pokémart: bottled water heals 50 HP and costs 200 Pokédollars, as compared to the basic Potion that only heals 20 HP and costs 300 Pokédollars.
  • There also exist a number of food items (Lava Cookie, Casteliacones, etc.) that cure a Pokemon of most Status Effects. Like the above, they're often more cost-effective than the Full Heals in Pokemarts, though they're usually only sold in one place or during certain times.
• In all three installments of Quest of Yipe, various food items restore your Hit Points.
• In Sailor Moon: Another Story, most healing items are comestibles, including nigiri, chocolate, and orange juice.
• In Sanctuary RPG, eating bread fully heals the player for some reason.
• In the indie game Sensible Erection RPG, the end boss points to the existence of this trope in their world ("How could hamburgers cure gaping shotgun wounds?!") as evidence that they live in a computer game.
• Shin Megami Tensei:
  • Food serves as weak healing items in Persona 3 and 4. It's rarely worth using in comparison to medicine-type items, and in Persona 3, many food items also have additional adverse effects. Persona 4 does have one easily missed yet useful food item and the food items that your team members give you throughout dungeons are often more effective.
  • Shin Megami Tensei IV:
    • There are bars in Tokyo where you can eat some rather questionable foodstuffs that provide a full party heal.
    • The demon meat items like the Expanse Meat restore marginal amounts of HP; you're better off selling them.
• In Soulbringer, food items (specifically: apples, bread, fish, chicken, and ham) are the earliest healing items. Herbs and mushrooms can occasionally do the same thing, but most often they have other benefits (and if you're not careful, certain types can have debilitating effects). Sadly, potions soon become more cost and weight-effective. It's oddly entertaining to stop a fight to scarf down a whole baked chicken for an instant health boost. The game also has alcohol... but the protagonist can't hold his liquor well. After one bottle of wine, your movement becomes wonky. After two bottles of wine or a few mugs of ale (which restore health... two points apiece), you get heartily sick and vomit (losing health).
• Star Ocean uses food mostly for healing; medicine also makes its way into the game as healing items, but they are more like to be antidotes and cures.
• In all Super Mario Bros. RPG games (Super Mario RPG, Paper Mario, Mario & Luigi), food and drink restore health while other types restore FP. Mushrooms are the common item types to use to recover HP while syrups are the go-to for FP restoration. You can even dip mushrooms in syrups to combine their effects! Presumably, the restoring factors in items are proteins for HP and sugars for FP.
• In later Tales of... games, cooking food heals a portion of HP and TP depending on the dish and the skill of the cook, but this can only be done outside of battle, and once you've cooked, you can't do it again until you've been through a fight or slept ("Come on, we just ate!")
• In TaskMaker, general foods such as Rations, Sack Lunch, or Picnic Basket will only replenish the Food meter, but other foods such as Spinach or a Dagwood Sandwich will also restore Health and other stats. Conversely, some areas will have Spoiled Apples which will make the player hungrier. Similarly, in The Tomb of the TaskMaker, generic foods only restore the Food meter, while chocolate bars have minor healing properties and "Bucky's Famous Beef Stew" will replenish all stats; conversely, moldy bread will make the player hungrier. Also, the game has various coffee drinks available which also have minor healing properties and will replenish the rarely used Thirst meter.
• A very old example of this is Treasure of Tarmin. Regaining health required using a rest button which took several units of time and one unit of food, in the form of flour sacks scattered through the dungeon.
• In The Treehouse Man, you can restore health by eating Gosberries.
• Undertale uses a variety of foods (ice cream, burgers, donuts, pies, etc.) that restores your HP and can be either bought in shops or found in the field. Certain foods can make certain boss battles much easier if you use them in those fights. Justified, since In-Universe monster food is made of magic, which instantly dissolves and heals whoever eats it. The items which make fights easier are typically linked with the boss through its creation; for example, the spider boss is beaten if you hang onto the item made by spiders. There is an NPC in the first town who remarks how curious he is about human food and how it differs from monster food; how it spoils, it can't be ingested instantaneously, it takes time to digest, and requires a trip to the bathroom afterward. That said, he's interested to try some.
• Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines plays the vampiric variant of this trope straight, but with a twist — while you can suck hostile NPCs dry with impunity, killing an "innocent" by overfeeding will make you take a hit to your Humanity. (In either event, it's a really bad idea to let ordinary humans see you feed.)
• Witchers in The Witcher are explicitly noted as having an odd metabolism. This also goes beyond food to explore point 6 a bit — Witcher's potions (which use fuckoff-strength alcohol as a base and go from there) are noted to be lethal to normal people, and even the player can overdose if they drink too many at once.

Shoot 'em Up

• In Kolibri, Kolibri can spawn health pickups in the early levels by sipping nectar from blossoms. Justified by Real Life hummingbirds famously having an actual hyperactive metabolism, to the point of having to hibernate instead of sleep every night lest they starve to death.
• Exaggerated and Played for Laughs in Red Solstice 2: Survivors: healing items are usually medical supplies, such as medkits, which heal players over time. The full effect of a medkit takes thirty seconds, and will usually restore a bit under half of a player's health. "Magnum" Pizza, however, is an item that can be rarely found that will instead fully heal a player in a few seconds on use and immediately clears all negative effects, meaning pizza in Red Solstice 2: Survivors can neutralize any venom, completely prevent exsanguination, fix all of your bone fractures and completely cure you from the brink of death in moments.
• Triggore: You can eat chocolate bars to regain lost health.

Simulation Games

• Ordinary Harvest Moon games use food to "heal" you as well. However, since your "HP" is actually fatigue and stamina, it makes a bit more sense that food "heals" you.
• In Shepherd's Crossing, you heal your wounded dogs by giving them meat. If you have herbivorous animals in your hunting party, you can also heal them with grass and seeds.
• SimAnt abstracts food-energy and health into a single meter that runs down over time, runs down faster when you're fighting, and replenishes when you eat those little green balls that make up the food in the game.
• Food easily recovers health and stamina in Stardew Valley.

Stealth-Based Games

• Worms serve as health restorers in The Lord of the Rings: Gollum.
• Metal Gear:
  • You recover health by eating rations in the games up to Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty. Particularly ridiculous about this is the fact that you can equip rations in your active inventory slot, where they will automatically be used if your health is brought to zero — i.e., Snake can eat food, digest it, and heal a significant amount in the time it takes him to die from being shot. In Snake Eater and Portable Ops, more conventional first aid is used to recover health. Rations and other food are used in an arguably more realistic fashion as a means to recover stamina. Food that is kept too long will go bad. Spoiled or poisonous food will make you sick and deplete your stamina. This can be avoided by using long-lasting food such as rations or keeping captured animals alive in cages so their meat doesn't spoil.
  • The sequels play with the trope a fair bit: the second game establishes that rations taste fairly terrible, and in Snake Eater rations restore very little stamina in contrast to "real" foods like instant noodles.
  • Snake Eater plays with this trope quite a bit in that Snake can recharge the batteries on his equipment by eating glow-in-the-dark mushrooms. It's possible to radio your support team about this interesting development, but they all think you're just crazy.
  • Snake Eater also includes a "taste" mechanic - he has established likes and dislikes, but the more Snake eats a particular food, the more health and stamina it restores, suggesting he starts enjoying it better. For example, when he first tries scorpions, he hates them and they make his stomach hurt. The more he eats them, the more his negative voice lines change to positive ones and the more stamina they restore.
  • Guns of the Patriots uses a combination of the previous games' systems, where food items recover Old Snake's health and psyche (this game's equivalent to stamina) both. In addition to the returning rations, which restore 75% of his health and 5% of his psyche and can be equipped for automatic use if his life is brought to zero, he can also eat some instant noodles or gulp down an energy drink to recover all of his health and up to 50% of his psyche, depending on the environment he eats it in (e.g. the cold energy drink recovers more stamina in the hot desert of Act 1).
• In Thief, Garrett can regain health by eating certain types of food, but only in Normal mode. On harder difficulties, food items become useless.

Survival Horror

• Eating food in the first three Alone in the Dark games is the central, if not only, way to regain lost health — except that "food" in this case usually translates to "flasks of liquid courage". The second and third games are so loose with the liquor from enemy drops and static pickups that protagonist Edward Carnby must go from simple Badass Normal to Drunken Master.
• In Bendy and the Ink Machine, Joey Drew Studios is littered with old cans labeled bacon soup. Henry can instantly regain full health by consuming one.
• In The Coma: Cutting Class, health is restored through consuming burgers, chocolate bars, and various beverages (including coffee). Most of these must be bought from vending machines, but there are several full bottles of water inexplicably scattered around the school.
• In Deadly Creatures, the chief source of health is crickets.
• Flesh Birds: You can regain health by eating berries you find on bushes in the woods.
• All foods in Last Day on Earth: Survival provide an instant health boost. Medical supplies are more effective but harder to come by, so players not expecting serious trouble often carry a pocket full of carrot stew for emergencies.
• Resident Evil:
  • While the healing herbs you find may have been used as a poultice, there's no mistaking what's being done to heal yourself with the eggs and fish in Resident Evil 4.
  • And even less mistaking in RE 5, where animations have been added for various item usage - when you eat an egg, your character cracks it on their hip and casually gulps it down. Herbs appear to be ground up and put in a spraying device to be sprayed over the body like first-aid sprays.
  • Rare rotten eggs appear in RE5. If you eat them, don't expect it to help matters.
• In Rule of Rose, the healing items manifest in the form of various sweets and pies.
• Skinwalker Hunt: You can eat food to regain a very significant amount of health.
• Syndrome: Eating food is how you regain lost health.
• ThanksKilling Day: Food items strewn throughout the game, like peanut butter and jelly, are listed as healing items.
• In Yuppie Psycho, health is recovered through eating and drinking.

Third-Person Shooter

• In Bullet Girls Phantasia, the healing items range from sweet berries to elaborate, modern desserts like cakes and parfaits, healing your character's injuries nigh instantly on pick-up.
• In Gun, the only method of health restoration is drinking whiskey which you keep in a side flask that holds a few gulps (each gulp restores you to full). It becomes particularly absurd in hard places where refills are scattered around (or in at least one case where they respawn) and you are left wondering not only how he can still shoot straight, but how come he doesn't have to pee. It is made even better by the comments the enemies make about how you can't hold your liquor.
• The primary healing item in Rune is food: Apples, huge legs of meat (up to a couple feet long!), tankards of mead, even live lizards. Ragnar eats them quite enthusiastically too, bolting down all of it seemingly in a single mouthful and tossing whatever's left to the ground (especially biting the heads off lizards Ozzy-style). Not to even mention that if you manage to lose an arm, eat a leg of meat, and it grows back instantly!

Turn-Based Tactics

• The vast majority of the healing items in the Disgaea series are food, usually sweets of some sort. Among them, there are some oddities like barbecue sauce as an MP restorative.
• Odium, among its healing items, has the "food" item, which restores 20 HP.

Wide-Open Sandbox

• Medkits in Dead Island are rare, so you'll have to rely on the energy drinks, candy bars, and fruit scattered all over the island for health. Energy drinks in particular are extremely common; it's a wonder how the player character can down eight cans in a row without suffering from a heart attack.
• The primary healing item in Dead Rising is food as well, and it has some realistic properties. Cooked meat heals more than raw meat, and raw meat will spoil if carried too long, for example. Infinity mode (which you unlock after beating the game) makes eating the very object of the game, as starvation will slowly sap your health points. Also, food has some unrealistic properties. One example is mixing orange juice with coffee creamer in a blender will give you a speed boost for some reason.
• Dragon Quest Builders and its sequel use a similar system as Minecraft, using a hunger bar that grants Regenerating Health with a full stomach. Some foods, however, can also be used to instantly restore HP.
• Grand Theft Auto:
  • Grand Theft Auto: Vice City has fast food stores where Tommy can eat to restore health to 100 points if he's below that. The cost is high, however, at $1 per hit point.
  • Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas: CJ can heal by eating meals at fast-food restaurants, or by purchasing snacks and drinks at vending machines. Eating more than needed at once doesn't add more health, and more than 10 make CJ puke and lose a bit of health. Eating greasy food (i.e. anything other than the Salad Meal) too often increases CJ's fat level, causing him to walk slower, giving him unique voice lines, and preventing certain missions from being started until you drop it low enough by either exercising or starving. If you go too long without eating, CJ will start starving and lose 1% fat every in-game hour; if the fat level is at 0, muscle will be consumed, and if that hits 0 as well, his health is next.
  • Grand Theft Auto IV: Niko can also regain health by eating food like burgers and hot dogs at street vendors, diners, and such. Like Vice City, this is purely for healing, as there is no more hunger stat. You can take friends and girlfriends to eat as well, and they have preferences.
  • Grand Theft Auto V: The player characters can buy Sprunk soda cans from machines and candy at convenience stores to eat and regain health, but nothing else. The most you can do is drink while hanging out with a friend. In Online, you can store snacks to eat whenever you please. You have to wait for an animation if you're on foot, but you eat them instantly if you're in a vehicle, so it's helpful to keep the snack menu open if you're in a car chase and low on health/armor.
• Anything living in Jaws Unleashed can be consumed for health.
• Mafia II subscribes to this trope. While being shot will eventually just heal itself after a few seconds, damage slowly chips away at your maximum health. Eating and drinking (both, in that order) will return your max health. Lampshaded during conversation:
  Vito: Who is this doctor, anyway?
  Joe: Some guy who patches our guys up for a bit of money without asking questions. Why do you care, anyway? You heal up from things really fast. Must be your diet.
• Prior to beta 1.8, Minecraft treated all food items this way. It has since been replaced with Regenerating Health fueled by a full stomach, which as of version 1.9 happens quickly enough to qualify.
• The primary method of health restoration in Postal 2 is by eating food. There are also medkits, which are naturally more effective than food items (30 health from one compared to at most 10 from a bag of fast food), but they can't be picked up and brought with you when you need them. The best healing items are crack pipes, which instantly boost you 25 points above the normal maximum once smoked, but after a few minutes, you lose that bonus from withdrawal unless you smoke another one. Additionally, if you have boosted your health you can't pick up more food.
• In [PROTOTYPE], while Alex does have a Healing Factor, he gains health back much faster by eating people and his healing factor can only heal him up to half of his max health. More powerful victims like Hunters and Leader Hunters restore a huge chunk of his life bar when eaten. A rare example where it makes perfect sense, as Alex's anatomy is nothing like a human's and most likely can directly replace the missing/damaged parts with the absorbed biomass.
• In the first two Saints Row games, you can instantly restore your health in single-player by eating fast food in the middle of combat. In the multiplayer for the first game, you can eat a hamburger to restore your health, but the healing doesn't happen until you've spent some time in cover without receiving damage.
• Although Tony Montana in Scarface: The World Is Yours doesn't get to consume food as a means of restoring health, he can pay to use a "blood bank" and instantly regain health by just having a blood transfusion. He can also urinate at dumpsters to regain a bit of health.
• In Sleeping Dogs (2012), edibles completely restore Wei Chen's health and provide a temporary buff, depending on what was consumed.
  • Food provides Regenerating Health.
  • Dragon Kick energy drinks increase melee damage.
  • Herbal Tea increases damage resistance.
• Food items that heal are readily available throughout the zone in all S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games. They don't heal much but are also necessary to stave off hunger. If you run into some badly irradiated spots and don't have the appropriate protective gear/artifact or anti-radiation drugs to down, chugging a bottle of vodka is the next best thing. Downing a can of energy drink instantly refills your Sprint Meter, and in Call of Pripyat, temporarily buffs the regeneration for it as well.
• Valheim: Health and Stamina are increased and regained slowly by eating food, with cooked food giving larger amounts. Having the "Rested" buff makes the regeneration faster, and later the player cam make mead that gives a separate regen buff as well.

Non-video game examples:

Anime & Manga

• Allen Walker from D.Gray-Man. After a long, hard battle, he starts binge eating. One can assume that he has an extremely hyperactive metabolism when, even after eating a gigantic pile of food the size of a room, he is seen remaining rail thin. Explained as he's a parasite-type innocence user, technically, he's eating for two, Krory's also been alluded to having this appetite when he's not snacking on Akuma blood.
• Dragon Ball:
  • While perhaps not demonstrating healing capabilities, Goku is repeatedly shown to have a bottomless stomach that allows him to consume a positively ridiculous amount of food. In addition, this food completely replenishes his health while not slowing him down in the slightest. In fact, that energy gained by Goku from eating more than his weight in food tends to make the difference between winning and losing a fight.
  • There's also the vaunted Senzu Beans, which recovers your strength, heals all wounds, and fills you up for days. They end up Holding Back the Phlebotinum when Yajirobe eats a whole bunch of them during the Demon King Piccolo saga and the team can only get enough for one major heal per saga afterwards.
• In Fairy Tail, the "Slayer" Schools of magic — Dragon Slayer Magic, Devil Slayer Magic, and God Slayer Magic — are able to consume elemental energies for healing, augmenting physical abilities, and replenishing mana. These schools are divided into subschools based on which precise element an individual can manipulate, and thus eat, although there are rare Dragon Slayer Mages who are able to consume two different kinds of element. The most notable example is, of course, the protagonist Natsu Dragneel, whose Fire Dragon Slayer Magic style lets him consume flames. Other notable practitioners are Gray Fullbuster, who practices Ice Devil Slayer Magic, the Iron Dragon Slayer Gajeel Redfox, and the Sky Dragon Slayer Wendy Marvell.
• In JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Diamond is Unbreakable, Antonio's Stand, Pearl Jam, causes any food it touches to cure all of the eater's ailments, albeit in a rather disgusting manner as all harmful matter is instantly expelled from that person's body.
• One Piece:
  • Luffy seems to operate on this system, adhering to all four points: not only is he seemingly capable of eating nearly anything he finds with no apparent ill effects, he has a preference for meat of any kind, which seems to recover more health and energy. At one point he eats a couple of chicken legs after being wounded, and it is pointed out that he's doing this in order to recover from some of the damage in a pinch. Also, he can eat to the point of becoming a giant ball (being made of rubber may help that part) and digest everything in seconds, returning to his slim appearance.
  • Also, Brooke can heal rather quickly by drinking milk. Granted, he is a skeleton and only needs calcium to heal.^note His powers not only include coming back from the dead (once), but also the ability to eat, drink, see, think, and, yes, poop without any organs.
  • There's also a technique for this trope. It's called Life Return, was used by Kumadori after eating all the food in the fridge in which he was locked. After using the technique, he became slim and then acquired his normal appearance.
• In the manga adaptation of One-Punch Man, Garou immediately recovers from the injuries he sustained fighting a bunch of Heroes by quickly consuming all of the meat (presumably for protein and energy) and salad dishes (presumably for vitamins and fiber) at a diner and washing it all down with a lot of water.
• Played interestingly in Strike Witches. Georgette Lemare of the 502nd is a Big Eater because using her healing magic actually does send her metabolism into overdrive.
• Exaggerated in one episode of Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann, Simon and Kamina find themselves unable to operate the Gurren Lagann due to being too hungry. Boota tears off his tiny little tail, which Simon splits in half for him and Kamina to eat. Once they've had this snack, they gain their Heroic Second Wind instantly.
• Pretty much the main method of increasing one's strength or recovering from wounds in Toriko is to eat something... or someone. Given that the entire series is based on eating the most delicious food in the world, it's not that out of place.

Comedy

• Pete Holmes has a bit where he lampoons this trope. He imagines Hagar going to the doctor because he's feeling bad. When asked what he's been doing recently, Hagar relates how, while "fighting," he punched a barrel and found an apple on the street, which he promptly ate. When questioned further, he admits to having eaten an entire baked turkey off the ground as well.

Fan Works

• In Cursed Blood, Izuku's Quirk grants him a very powerful Healing Factor that is powered by his own energy reserves. Due to this, he can quickly digest a lot of food in a short time — at one point, he eats three pizzas in a few minutes without a problem.
• In the So Bad, It's Good fanfic "WOlfenstien Comeback'', the titular "Wolfenstein" demonstrates this trope in the first chapter, with the added bonus that rather than actually putting the food in his mouth, he absorbs it by touching it in true video game fashion.
  Back in the froom that Wolfenstein was currently in at that time he jumped on a nearby table and the food osmosised into his body and instantly heeld him because that is how he eats.

Film — Animation

• Parodied in The Castle of Cagliostro. Lupin is severely wounded and seemingly comatose when he suddenly awakens and demands large amounts of food to restore his strength. In the middle of gorging himself on a veritable feast, he suddenly turns green, stops eating, and whispers that he'll sleep now. Played straight in that he does indeed soon have his strength back.
• Encanto: Julieta's gift is the ability to make healing foods, which she uses those abilities to help out the people in the village. Most of the other time, she often heals her accident-prone husband Agustín, which was pretty much how they ended up getting married prior to the film.

Literature

• Chrysalis (RinoZ): Eating biomass fuels monsters' Healing Factor, although it's not instantaneous; it will quickly fix cuts and scrapes, but regenerating severed limbs will take several days or additional healing magic.
• In the Crystal Singer series, Crystal Singers are infected with a viral symbiote that gives them Healing Factor, effective immunity to disease, enhanced senses, prolonged lifespan, and a greatly increased appetite to fuel it all.
• Engineereds in Duumvirate eat quite a bit more than a normal human, particularly if they're regenerating severe wounds.
• In The Fruit of Evolution, Rurune the donkey is a similar case to Goku; when she's full, she's a physical juggernaut capable of Super-Strength, Super-Speed and magically enhanced kick attacks. As she gets hungrier though, and she gets hungry very quickly, she grows correspondingly weaker. The first major depiction of this trait is in volume 3, chapter 10 of the light novel, where she is at first only able to trot sluggishly along in a race due to being hungry. Chowing down on a Fruit of Evolution, which instantly states hunger completely, imbues her with the ability to immediately catch up to the other racers — who were halfway around the track at that point — dodge through a pack of powerful wolf monsters, oneshot the alpha wolf monster in passing, and then win the race effortlessly.
• Downplayed in the Great Ship universe. Humanity has long become Transhuman with heavily augmented healing, allowing them to heal from anything as small as a papercut to complete body loss, should they have enough biomass. If the body doesn't have enough fat and such from food to work from, it'll start cannibalizing lower-priority muscles and bones; characters who have lost arms are noted to be several inches shorter after the arm is regrown. In Eater of Bone, the protagonist's healing is stunted due to malnutrition but goes into overdrive when given a supply of salts and metals rare in the planet's environment.
• In the Inheritance Cycle, casting magic consumes body energy/stamina, so a mage who just cast an energy-intensive spell will probably be pretty hungry. On the other hand, unless the energy is replenished from either another being or a gem that was previously filled with energy, it requires rest to regain.
• In Loyal Enemies, there's a long-time healing spell that allows one to recover from nearly dying but it has some side effects. Veres uses it to heal himself but spends most of the book being chronically hungry and eating anything he can get his hands on, even if it might be unpalatable because the food is immediately turned into energy and used to power the healing process.
• In Dean Koontz's Mr. Murder, Alfy has abnormally fast reflexes, extended endurance, and can heal from injuries that would kill an ordinary human several times over. All of this is fueled by a terrifyingly voracious appetite.
• Justified in the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series with ambrosia and nectar, the food and drink of the gods that is used for healing severely injured demigods. If a demigod consumes too much (or a mortal has any amount whatsoever), the power is too great and will incinerate them from the inside out.
• Deconstructed in The Troop. Infected eat like crazy, and still end up starving to death.
• The Xanth novel Crewel Lie features Jordan the Barbarian, whose magic talent is a Healing Factor that requires large amounts of food to work, to the extent that when the scattered bits of his skeletonized corpse are brought together at the end of the book, he has to have bread crammed into him to regenerate.

Live-Action TV

• In the Doctor Who episode "The Unicorn and the Wasp", the Doctor is poisoned, and his Time Lord physiology enables him to neutralize the poison with a combination of various salts and proteins. Of course, it just looks like he's gobbling everything he can find in the kitchen.
• Barry Allen of The Flash (2014) has this, due to the fact that his Super-Speed essentially extends to the cells in his body, greatly increasing the rate at which he metabolizes food. As a result, he Never Gets Drunk^note Except for the time Caitlin made him an extremely strong alcoholic drink, and even then, he was only buzzed for a few seconds and is physically required to be a Big Eater, as a normal meal would fail to satisfy his nutritional needs.

Tabletop Games

• Bang! has a "Beer" card that heals a player after they've been shot.
• Changeling: The Lost: The Contract Clause "Gluttonous Feast of Health" allows this. It works especially well if your character has access to particularly hearty, abundant fare, eats for at least three hours, or better yet both.
• Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition:
  • The Chef feat allows a character with it to fix meals whenever taking a short rest. Anyone who eats the meal as part of the short rest will receive a small amount of bonus healing if they spend one or more hit dice to recover health during that short rest.
  • The Vigor of the Hill Giants feat allows the character to recover a small amount of health for free during a short rest if they eat something while taking the rest.
  • The spell Heroes' Feast conjures a magical feast that, among other things, raises the current and maximum hitpoints of anyone who partakes of the feast for 24 hours. Not precisely healing, but it's close.
• GURPS contains bioengineered ultra-tech pills that rapidly heal injuries and even radiation damage by accelerating your metabolism for a short time.
• Iron Kingdoms: Trollbloods will eat nearly anything, from rocks and oil to humans and other Trollkin. This fuels their extremely rapid regeneration. Some regenerate so quickly that hands and legs that are hacked off will grow into a separate miniature Trollkin.
• Only War: The Kroot's Eater of the Dead rule allows them to, once per encounter, gorge on flesh to instantly restore hit points.
• One of the white cards in Shadowhunters is a chocolate bar, which heals Allie, Emi, and the Unknown to full if they draw it and are revealed (or choose to reveal themselves).
• The Unofficial Hollow Knight RPG: Certain traits allow a bug to expend Belly to gain some other benefit, such as the Regeneration trait spending Belly to regain Hearts, or the Large Stomach trait allowing them to spend Belly in place of Stamina. The Devourer trait doesn't make a bug spend Belly, but instead allows them to regain a point of Heart, Soul, or Stamina when they consume enough flesh or blood from sapient bugs, as well as letting them eat corpses very quickly. This is generally Averted though, as while having a full stomach causes a bug to heal faster when they rest, the aforementioned traits are needed to have any kind of instant benefit from food.
• Werewolf: The Forsaken makes it explicit that werewolves require higher caloric intake in order to regenerate and shift with ease, meaning that most werewolves will have four meals a day at least.

Webcomics

• Alien Dice: Played straight; however, the "food" is not exactly organic material, and has odd and often medical properties.
• A Beginner's Guide to the End of the Universe uses this as part of its RPG Mechanics 'Verse. Eating food gives Nutrition points, which can be spent to heal Hit Points as a one-for-one exchange or Toxicity as twice the expense.
• El Goonish Shive: Lampshaded when Ellen and Nanase are playing Fable II. "And we can use pies to keep our HP up!" Sure enough, after the fight, the character is almost spherical. Celery will fix that, though.
• Prezleek Comics parodies this every so often. Prez has had to pause a boss fight to eat a shark at a normal rate, choked trying to eat a shark in one bite, and had sharks spoil when left in his bank too long.
• This installment of Rune Hunters parodies the ability in Skyrim to pause the game during combat to eat.

Web Original

• In the forum game Apocalypse Metropolis, all players only have four slots of health, which meant getting shot was equal to getting punched. To heal these wounds, eating food restored a slot, even if it was a sandwich or soda. Actual healing items would often do more than one slot at least. On a similar note, splitting up food (like drinking half of a soda so someone else can have a half) decreased the chances of healing.
• Discussed in Cracked articles:
  • 7 Video Game Healing Methods Least Likely to Actually Work
  • One of 31 Life Lessons You Can Only Learn From Video Games is that "eating food you find in the trash is good for you."
• The goofy, game-centric humorists of Rooster Teeth explore this trope in an episode of their Immersion series here. Hilarity Ensues as we watch Gus and Geoff suffer for the amusement of the viewers (and the 'scientists' responsible for the idea).
• In part 3 of "Video Game People Do Not Act Like Normal People" by Jeffrey Channing Wells, Madeline Chesney (Savior of Arcanum) is able to heal herself (in the middle of a battle, since she turned on turn-based combat) by eating the party's entire supply of food. The party healer is baffled and alarmed by this since she knows biology doesn't work that way.
  "Gar," said Jayna, staring, "what is she? Some sort of inhuman monster?"
  "No, miss," replied Gar. "She is a hero."

Western Animation

• Gravity Falls: Discussed by Dipper in "Fight Fighters" as he's looking for power-ups for Rumble in the fridge.
  Dipper: Well, we don't have any traditional power-ups; turkey legs, pizza boxes, or gold rings.
• Mentioned in Scooby-Doo as the reason why Shaggy and Scooby can eat so much food despite both being so skinny. They claim it's because they're so scared all the time their nervous energy burns off the calories rather quickly.

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