Sedition à la carte| How the faithful come to believe

“Over five years, I went to more than 15 senior specialists across five different fields and paid over 600,000 pounds. My condition didn’t improve…in fact, the medications made my symptoms worse. After the Tayyibat diet, every single symptom vanished.”

This quote, submitted by a participant in an online survey conducted by the fact-checking initiative Saheeh Masr about their experience with the “Tayyibat” diet, sheds light on why the diet has spread so massively; despite directly contradicting the most basic principles of medicine, as discussed in our previous article.

The regimen devised by the late Diaa Al Awady was never just a menu. He presented it as a cure for medical conditions: no drugs required, no doctor visits needed. We cannot underestimate how persuasive that formula is in a country where millions are denied basic healthcare, squeezed between slashed public spending, skyrocketing drug prices driven by currency devaluation, and doctor fees that have priced out ordinary people.

The collision of Al Awady’s magnetic rhetoric with millions of patients desperately searching for accessible care produced a charisma that crossed from mere appeal into outright danger, as cases mounted of people following his advice straight into medical disaster.

Why do believers believe?

How did a single anesthesiologist, operating through YouTube and Facebook, fill a void in the lives of hundreds of thousands that an entire healthcare apparatus could not?

The online survey conducted by the Saheeh Masr  newsroom following Al Awady’s death, which gathered 205 responses, offers a useful map for understanding this pull.

When participants were asked what drew them to Al Awady, their answers revealed overlapping layers rather than competing motives. The single strongest reason was “explaining illness in a way that makes sense,” followed by the impact of testimonials from people who felt genuine improvement after starting the diet—unverified medically, but emotionally resonant.

Al Awady didn’t just fill an information gap. He filled an economic and institutional void left open by a health system hollowed out by austerity

Other reasons followed: a belief that pharmaceutical companies were conspiring against him, and the religious undertones of his discourse, which lent him a mantle of legitimacy in their eyes.

These motivations alone don’t explain his reach. This dietary sedition is the natural offspring of a culture obsessed with virality, where social media has become the primary source of truth.

What fuels this fixation with Instagram Reels and TikToks is an unshakeable faith that whatever gets the highest views must be the best. That conviction has created a parallel ecosystem where consumers hunt for salvation in trending clips, while influencers and fame-seekers hustle to pitch themselves through the same algorithm.

People aren’t a herd

This is where superficial readings of the phenomenon fall short. They tend to portray followers either as naive victims led blindly by the nose, or as zealots swallowed whole by conspiracy theories against modern medicine. Neither caricature captures what is actually happening on the ground; a conclusion I arrived at through interviews with followers of the diet.

The recurring pattern was clear: despite fiercely defending Al Awady and branding him a “martyr,” followers rarely practiced the diet to the letter. Most focused on cutting out eggs and chicken specifically and switching to whole-wheat bread; changes that were easy to embrace because they tapped into pre-existing, mainstream notions of “healthy eating.” Meanwhile, many kept eating legumes, vegetables, and fruit “if they could”: items explicitly banned or strictly rationed under Al Awady’s rules.

When it came to medication, the red line held firmer. None of the people I spoke with permanently stopped taking their prescription drugs for chronic illnesses. Even those who paused their meds sporadically almost always went back to them.

One person I interviewed resumed their prescription out of fear that their symptoms would worsen; another returned to it under pressure from their adult children. This retreat was driven partly by lingering doubt about Al Awady’s claims, and partly by family who harbored an instinctive, visceral dread of abandoning chronic disease medication without a doctor’s say-so.

Many followers exercised a conscious filtering process, keeping his most dangerous directive, stopping chronic illness medication completely firmly off-limits

This pattern was no isolated anomaly. Data from the Saheeh Masr survey confirms it: the vast majority refused Al Awady’s most radical instruction to quit medication entirely, even if a significant minority still took dangerous gambles by adjusting dosages or briefly quitting without medical supervision.

What these details reveal is a pattern of selective agency. Many believed Al Awady’s emotional, narrative-driven pitch; they sympathized with him, defended him, and viewed him as a martyr. Yet at the same time, most engaged in a deliberate filtering process. They kept his most lethal instruction—stopping chronic disease medication altogether—outside their daily reality, adopting only the lower-risk elements that aligned with what they already believed about food.

This does not negate the fact that literal compliance existed, ending in documented tragedies. But it means we are not dealing with a “completely gullible audience.” Rather, we are looking at people listening to a message that touches a genuine wound, without blindly handing over the keys to their survival.

“Follow Tayyibat, but take your medicine”

Remarkably, the real line of defense against Al Awady’s deadliest advice didn’t come from official institutions, despite their frantic attempts at counter-messaging. It came from the patient’s immediate social circle. Time and again, relatives and neighbors stepped in, urging believers to keep checking their blood sugar and blood pressure and to stay on their meds. It formed a parallel firewall, often far more effective than formal press releases and media warnings.

In many families I spoke with, household negotiations produced a pragmatic compromise, captured in a single phrase: “Just follow Tayyibat, but take your medicine.” That was how one mother reasoned with her diabetic son.

“Don’t worry, Mom,” he reassured her. “I never stopped taking my meds. I just stopped putting sugar in my tea and cut out sweets. I’m following Tayyibat, and I honestly feel better.” This negotiation, simple on its face, distills what actually happened. It was neither total surrender to the doctrine nor total rejection of it, but a negotiated middle space, one that preserved the life-saving drugs while borrowing whichever dietary tips felt sensible.

The void left by hollowed-out public healthcare spending was no silent background to this phenomenon; it was its founding condition

The central question lingers: why did hundreds of thousands of Egyptians need a lone social media figure to make them feel—if only for a moment—that someone was listening, explaining their pain, and offering what entire hospitals failed to deliver: a promise of healing?

Returning to the starting point is essential. The chasm carved out by underfunded public healthcare was never passive backdrop; it was the precondition. When citizens pay more than half their medical bills out of pocket, and when over half the population cannot afford an adequate daily diet, any “free, magical” alternative watched on a smartphone screen—rather than paid for in a clinic—becomes irresistible through economic necessity long before it convinces through logic.

This explains why the selective agency we documented was not an intellectual exercise by savvy followers, but a survival strategy: take what costs nothing from the diet (altering eating habits), while clinging to the medication—costly, yes, but undeniably dangerous to abandon.

Al Awady did not merely fill an information gap. He filled an economic and institutional vacuum left by a public health system burdened by austerity, incapable of giving patients a listening ear or treatment that doesn't bankrupt them. As long as this material and human breach remains open, another voice will step in with another regimen, another miracle promise—scientific, superstitious, or some bizarre new hybrid.

In closing this discussion of Al Awady, we must remember that debating his ideas is no mere theoretical exercise; it touches an urgent medical reality. Investigative reports have documented deaths directly linked to his instructions, including a young girl and a young man—both diabetic—who died after abandoning their insulin.

These cases draw an uncompromising boundary for any balanced discussion of this phenomenon: no matter how deeply we understand the social and psychological forces pulling people toward this discourse, the immediate threat to human life—especially among vulnerable groups like children and Type 1 diabetics—remains a reality that permits neither softening nor re-framing.

Perhaps Al Awady’s fame and the craze surrounding his anti-scientific advice should compel us to pause and confront the state of healthcare in Egypt—a system that quietly assassinates thousands through neglect, leaving them prey to market cruelty and social media myths.