How (and why) Diaa El Awadi’s tayyibat diet became so popular — and what happens if you follow it

🍎 On 20 April 2026, Dr. Diaa El Awadi was found dead in his hotel room in Dubai. The medical report cited cardiac arrest, and Egypt’s Foreign Affairs Ministry confirmed no foul play. Within hours, his Facebook groups — which had already grown exponentially — began circulating theories that El Awadi was “silenced” by the pharma industry for “telling the truth.” Weeks later, Egypt’s Supreme Council for Media Regulation issued a blanket ban on all content attributed to him, following warnings that his material poses a direct risk to citizens.

The diet El Awadi left behind — the tayyibat system — divides food into two categories: the wholesome (tayyibat) and the corrupt (khaba’eth). Vegetables, legumes, most fruits, eggs, poultry, and dairy fall into the second category. Sugar, white bread, Nutella, potatoes, and fries fall into the first. Followers are instructed to eat freely from the permitted list, stop counting calories, and — in the diet’s most dangerous provision — discontinue any medication that can be managed through food, including insulin. El Awadi argued that the digestive process consumes approximately 10% of the body’s energy, and that fiber, legumes, and complex foods require sustained effort from the gut and its microbiome.

By eliminating those foods, the body redirects energy toward healing. Needless to say, it’s bonkers. EnterpriseAM spoke with a counseling psychotherapist and a nutritionist and eating disorder specialist to further understand why the tayyibat diet took off, why skeptics turned into believers, how El Awadi’s own mannerisms contributed to the diet’s wide spread, and what happens when you follow it.

Why tayyibat spread

Understanding how a diet this nutritionally unsound accumulated mns of followers requires looking past the content and at the messenger. Khaled Salaheldin, a Cairo-based counseling psychotherapist (LinkedIn), tells EnterpriseAM that “there is a distinction between ‘Egypt’ (affluent individuals) and ‘Masr,’ the healthy living lifestyle has been co-opted by the people of ‘Egypt’ in a way that excludes the latter.” The tayyibat diet, in his reading, became an antidote to that exclusion — a regimen that asks you to remove things from your diet rather than source expensive alternatives, delivered in colloquial Arabic with no English terminology, by a man who sounded like he was from the same place as his audience. “That sort of delivery had a big impact,” he says.

It checks out — most wellness regimes ask their followers to spend more: on supplements, on organic produce, on gym memberships, on consultations. The tayyibat system asks them to spend less, and to distrust the institutions that would ask them to spend more. For a population navigating sustained inflation and steep healthcare cost increases, that positioning lands differently than it might elsewhere. Add the conspiracy framework — the pharma industry as the antagonist, El Awadi as the truth-teller — and the diet stopped being a nutritional choice and became something closer to an allegiance.

Sohila Hassan, a nutritionist and eating disorder dietitian, watched the spread from her practice and struggled to take it seriously at first. “I thought in the beginning it was a joke,” she tells EnterpriseAM. “I didn’t really believe that this is actually a diet that people would follow, because this is the worst, in my opinion, of all the diets.”

What changed her read was the type of client who started showing up — people with chronic conditions, autoimmune diseases, Hashimoto’s, celiac — who had tried the conventional path and felt abandoned by it, and who found in El Awadi someone who appeared to have answers. “He was funny, spontaneous, working-class, lovable, and made jokes around,” Hassan says. “If someone is desperate or has an autoimmune condition, they think, ‘I have to follow this guy because he knows better,’ it’s really a mind game.”

The science (or lack thereof)

There is a kernel of legitimate clinical logic buried in the tayyibat system, Hassan explains — which is part of what makes it effective at attracting followers, and dangerous in practice. In cases of severe IBS, SIBO, Crohn’s disease, or other gut conditions, clinicians do sometimes prescribe short-term elimination diets that reduce fiber, limit fruit and vegetables, and allow foods like potatoes and juices that would normally be moderated. The goal is to give the digestive tract temporary relief during a flare.

“We do this elimination diet for a bit to give a break to the digestive tract, and then we add one food after the other to experience how the gut will respond again,” Hassan tells us. The tayyibat system borrows that structure — the initial gut rest — and strips out everything that makes it clinically sound: the short time frame, supervision, and the systematic reintroduction of eliminated foods. What remains is an indefinite elimination diet built around sugar, with no professional oversight.

The immediate relief many followers report is, in Hassan’s assessment, physiologically real — and misleading. When the gut is no longer processing fiber, legumes, and fermented foods, the digestive system does relax. Bloating reduces. Energy, initially, improves. “People notice instant relief somehow,” Hassan says. “Because your digestive system is really relaxing and not doing any effort.” That relief converts skeptics into believers. What it conceals is what happens to the microbiome in the interim. “It’s like a muscle — if you’re not moving your muscle, it gets numb.” When followers eventually exit the diet, their gut is functionally depleted. A single apple can trigger headaches and exhaustion. One of Hassan’s clients described the experience as her “whole body collapsing.”

The aftermath

Hassan witnessed the consequences firsthand: Among her clients who experimented with the diet, the recurring pattern is short-term weight loss followed by rapid weight regain as the body adapts to elevated sugar intake and appetite regulation breaks down. “People don’t feel full, but they feel like they have a lot of energy,” she says. “You crash at some point and need more sugar.” When the weight returns, followers tend to assume they weren’t strict enough, restrict further, and develop what Hassan describes as a clear pattern of disordered eating — rigid rules, guilt around deviation, confusion about hunger signals.

The more acute cases involve medication. Hassan describes a client with advanced diabetes, who arrived at their sessions with blood sugar consistently in the healthy range. Then, gradually, the food diary went quiet. Blood sugar climbed to 300, then 400. When Hassan pressed them, the client was too ashamed to admit they had stopped insulin and begun the tayyibat diet. “It’s fully against any nutritional advice, it’s against everything,” Hassan says. “[The client] was ashamed to tell me because it doesn’t make sense.”

Posthumous success

El Awadi’s death did not break the movement. Salaheldin compares the dynamic to that of an artist whose work sells better posthumously — the death itself becomes confirmation of the narrative the audience already held. “It vindicated the conspiracy theories,” he tells us. “Why didn’t anyone defend him? Why did he die? Maybe they wanted to silence him because of the economics of the medical-industrial complex,” are all thoughts expressed by a number of his followers.

Hassan saw it in real time in her own TikTok comments after she posted a video explaining the microbiome science behind the diet’s initial relief effect. “People were saying, ‘We chose him, we chose him,’” she tells us, the phrasing deliberately echoing the language of political loyalty. Followers declared they would honor the diet after his death, that they were upholding his words, that following the tayyibat system was now a form of tribute. “It has less to do with nutrition, and more so with this figure of presumed authority that people followed.”

The people still following the tayyibat system are not, in most cases, irrational. They are responding to real conditions — chronic illness inadequately managed, healthcare that feels inaccessible or dismissive, a wellness culture that has been coded as belonging to a particular class — with a solution that offered them immediate, embodied relief and a community of people who understood why they needed it. That the relief was temporary and the long-term consequences serious is something many of them will discover only when they try to leave, and find the exit harder than the entrance.

For anyone currently on it, Hassan’s clinical guidance is simple: the exit requires structure. Eliminated foods need to be reintroduced gradually, one at a time, in the same way a supervised elimination diet is unwound. “We [handle] this the same as an elimination diet,” she says. “Incorporate fiber and foods that are not in the tayyibat diet slowly until you are back.” For those still considering it: “Experiment, but be attentive to how your body feels, not what everyone on social media is saying.”