How we source: where every claim on this site comes from.
A government erased this man's record so nobody could check it. So everything we publish has to be checkable.
Who ruled on each food: the doctor himself, or his rules?
Every one of the 575 foods on the food list has an answer. But they don't all come from the same place, and we always say which:
154
His own rulings
Foods Dr. Al-Awadi ruled on himself. Marked "His ruling".
418
Follow from his rules
Foods he never named. The verdict applies one of his rules to them. Marked "From his rules".
3
Foods where his own statements disagree
Foods where his own statements disagree. We show the contradiction instead of choosing a side for him.
Nine foods are marked unresolved, with the reason.
What gets published here.
Only what traces to a document or to his own recordings. Stories that lead back to a critic's video or a supporter's post do not appear here as fact, whichever side they favour.
The sources behind our headline.
"They lied to us about food" is a strong line. Here's what stands behind it.
Sugar money shaped fifty years of heart-disease advice.
The Sugar Research Foundation paid Harvard researchers about $48,000 in today's money for a review in the New England Journal of Medicine that blamed heart disease on fat and played down sugar. The funding wasn't disclosed.
Kearns, Schmidt & Glantz, JAMA Internal Medicine, 2016 · study record · NPR report
Cigarette companies owned some of America's biggest food brands.
Philip Morris and R.J. Reynolds owned Kraft, General Foods and Nabisco from 1980 to 2001. A 2023 study of foods sold from 1988 to 2001 found tobacco-owned foods were 29% more likely to be engineered fat-and-salt "hyper-palatable", and 80% more likely to be carb-and-salt hyper-palatable, than comparable foods.
Fazzino et al., Addiction, published online 2023 · PubMed · journal
Egypt ordered his recorded and written work removed.
Egypt's Supreme Council for Media Regulation prohibited publishing, broadcasting or re-circulating his material, on submissions from the Ministry of Health and Population and the Egyptian Medical Syndicate.
Reported by Al Arabiya, Youm7 and El Balad.