Do Falafels make you Feel Awful ?

 

Falafels are safe after all – in small doses, research on rats shows.

 

A study called  Effect of a popular Middle Eastern food (Falafel) on rat liver  is now available to the public.

 

Focusing strictly on the medical consequences (for rats) of eating "chickpeas paste seasoned with garlic, parsley, and special spices, then deep fried in vegetable oil", it's a 10-page journey from delight to despair, and finally to indifference.

 

Frying oil samples and falafel patties were collected from 20 restaurants. They homogenized the falafel, soaked it for 24 hours, filtered it through cheesecloth and centrifuged it. This produced the experimental material – concentrated falafel – with which they performed two experiments.

 
The first experiment assessed the short-term effect of eating falafel, short term in this case meaning five days. Janakat and Al-Khateeb extracted the oil from some falafel patties, and force-fed it to some rats for the whole five days. Then they killed those rats, and did post mortems to get at the livers. The livers (happily, in a sense) looked in pretty good shape. Thus, the report says, the short-term effects of eating falafel are pretty benign.
 
The second experiment aimed to clarify the long-term effect of falafel consumption. A fresh batch of rats got to eat lots of falafel – as much as they pleased, whenever they wanted it – for a month. That was their entire diet: falafel, falafel, falafel. Then they were killed. Here, the post mortem results were ugly. The study intones that "long-term consumption of falafel patties (30 days) caused yellowish discoloration of the liver distinctive of liver necrosis", suggesting that "the consumption of falafel as the sole source of nutrition for a long period of time ... can generate a hepatotoxic effect leading to liver necrosis".
 
That may sound like bad news, but apparently it's not. The very next sentence – nearly the last thing said in the report – is this: "Falafel consumption in moderation and in conjunction with other food items or beverages containing high antioxidant levels can be considered as safe."
 
http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2011/feb/14/falafel-food-improbable-research