Egypt’s latest wellness trend isn’t found in elite clinics and swanky gyms, but in cramped kitchens and WhatsApp groups.
In neighbourhood bakeries across the country, mothers swap screenshots of “permitted” and “forbidden” foods, while on TikTok young men boast they have “left medicine behind” thanks to a diet known as nizam el tayyibat – the “good food system”. It was devised by a doctor whose videos the state has ordered to be removed from public view.
One of the people affected by the craze is Ola Thabet, 43. She realised something was amiss when her teenage son started shunning the typical fare served in Egyptian homes.
“My son started to refuse a lot of the food I was serving. Eggs at breakfast, foul and lentils at lunch. It was strange,” she says. “He explained to me that he was on the tayyibat system and showed me videos explaining it and the doctor who created it.”
The videos claimed to show a path to curing chronic disease through food alone – if, and only if, a person strictly eats what is considered “good”.
Although Ms Thabet's son did not stick to the regimen for more than a couple of weeks, many others swear by it. Simply put, the system divides food into tayyibat, or pure, healing foods, and khabithat, which are harmful items said to cause inflammation and disease.
The man behind the trend, Diaa El Awady, was an Egyptian doctor trained in anaesthesia and intensive care who reinvented himself online as a therapeutic nutrition guru. He died in April at the age of 47.
He argued that most chronic illnesses, from diabetes to hypertension, could be treated by “healing the gut” and eliminating supposedly toxic food, with medication playing only a secondary role. His system prescribes a diet that is starkly at odds with much of the mainstream nutrition advice given to Egyptians.
Followers are encouraged to eat certain meats, starches and high‑sugar food. These include beef and lamb, potatoes and rice, dates, grapes and bananas, plus cheeses and rich animal fats. Many foods that the medical establishment has long considered healthy are to be avoided, under the system.
Mr El Awady’s diet bans or heavily restricts the consumption chicken and eggs, most fresh milk and yoghurt, many types of fish and seafood, leafy green vegetables, tomatoes and onions, as well as legumes such as lentils and beans. All pasta, most wheat flour products and soft drinks are also banned.
He said this would remove “poisons” that irritate the gut and immune system and claimed that, once the digestive tract is calmed, “the body that God created can cure itself”.
From Telegram to parliament
Egyptian authorities want the trend to disappear. Last month, the Supreme Council for Media Regulation ordered a blanket ban on publishing or circulating audio, visual or written content by Mr El Awady, saying his material “could harm public health and pose a direct risk to citizens”.
The move followed complaints from the Ministry of Health and the Egyptian Medical Syndicate, which had already revoked his licence and shut his clinic. Authorities said his “dangerous” advice included telling some diabetics and hypertensive patients they could reduce or stop taking medication if they followed his diet.
Nutritionists and endocrinologists echoed these concerns. In TV debates and fact‑checking online videos, they warned that eating only food described as tayyibat would remove core sources of protein, calcium, iron and vitamins, while encouraging people to consume generous portions of certain sugars and starches.
It is not simply concern about nutritional deficiencies, but also that people with diabetes, high blood pressure or kidney disease will quietly tweak or stop their medication, raising their risk of heart attacks, strokes and kidney damage.
Yet in reality, as Ms Thabet and her neighbour Noura Adel have found, the crackdown has done little to dim enthusiasm. Ms Adel, who works as a cleaner, first encountered the system while working for a client who had quietly ensured that she and her children adhered to it.
“Her young son was always complaining about being hungry and craving milk and cheese, which people on that diet aren’t allowed to have,” says Ms Adel, 41. “I finally gave him some cheese and when his mother became angry, I explained that everything is fine in moderation and that any extremes are probably going to be unhealthy. She didn’t listen.”
Mr El Awady’s following only grew after he died from a heart attack while abroad.
In Telegram groups and on TikTok, followers of the diet trade before‑and‑after pictures and talk of being cured of colitis, as well as “miracle” improvements in sleep and energy. Its supporters view the ban as proof that authorities are protecting pharmaceutical interests, not patients.
Tayyibat restaurant boom
That online fervour has also spilt into the commercial world. Across Cairo and other cities, a growing number of restaurants and home‑kitchen businesses now advertise themselves as “tayyibat” or “on the tayyibat system”, promising menus that conform to Mr El Awady’s rules.
On Wednesday, MP Ashraf Amin submitted a formal request for a briefing to Parliamentary Speaker Hisham Badawi, addressed to Prime Minister Mostafa Madbouly, Health Minister Khaled Abdel Ghaffar and the head of the National Food Safety Authority, Dr Tareq El-Houby, questioning how these outlets were licensed and supervised in the first place. Mr Amin also called for an investigation into the use of what he called misleading advertisements.
Mr Amin’s filing alleges a wave of “intensive promotional campaigns” by restaurants riding the diet’s popularity, using slogans and Mr El Awady’s name, without any clear scientific basis. He demanded to know which agency approved their branding, whether they underwent special inspections, and by what standards they claim their food is healthier than that served by competitors.
The row places small businesses in the crosshairs of a much larger battle over who gets to define “healthy” food in a country where inflation and a stretched public health system have already made basic nutrition a political issue.
Guru in life – and death
By the time his medical career imploded, Mr El Awady had cultivated the classic trappings of a wellness guru. He reinvented himself on YouTube and Facebook as a straight‑talking professor of “therapeutic nutrition”, railing against “poisonous” modern food and claiming people who followed his diet made extraordinary recoveries.
He combined Quranic language about tayyib food with modern pseudo‑scientific jargon about inflammation and gut healing. It proved an effective mix for viewers who felt neglected or misunderstood by the doctors they saw during hurried clinic visits.
By the time of his death, Mr El Awady had already been expelled from the Egyptian Medical Syndicate for “serious violations of scientific constants” and misleading the public, while health authorities were scrutinising his activities. Official statements about his death stressed there was “no criminal suspicion” and moved to quickly close the case. His followers, however, folded the sparse details into a familiar narrative of a cover‑up.
