When Brooke Brumfield wasnt battling morning sickness, she craved nachos. Like many first-time expectant mothers, she was nervous and excited about her pregnancy. She had just bought a house with her husband, a wildland firefighter who had enrolled in paramedic school to transition to firefighting closer to home. Everything was going according to plan until 20 weeks into Brumfields pregnancy, when she lost her job at a financial technology startup and, with it, her salary and three months paid maternity leave. After building a new business to support her family, she had clients, but childcare was limited, and her husbands schedule was always shifting. By the time her baby arrived, everything was beyond overwhelming, Brumfield says. I pretty much felt like a truck hit me.
Brumfield had heard stories from friends and family about a way to minimize the stress and emotional fallout of the postpartum period: consuming her placenta, the vascular organ that nourishes and protects the fetus during pregnancy and is expelled from the body after birth. The women swore by the results. They said their milk supply improved and their energy spiked. The lows caused by plummeting hormone levels didnt feel as crushing, they explained.
Brumfield enlisted her doula who, for a fee, would steam, dehydrate, and pulverize her placenta, pouring the fine powder into small capsules. She swallowed her placenta pills for about six weeks after delivering her daughter. She said they helped her feel more even, less angry and emotional. When her milk supply dipped, she says, I re-upped my intake and [the problem] was solved.
Social scientists and medical researchers call the practice of consuming ones own placenta placentophagy. Once confined to obscure corners of alternative medicine and the countercultures crunchier communities, it has been picked up by celebrities (Kourtney and Kim Kardashian, January Jones, Mayim Bialik, Alicia Silverstone, Chrissy Teigen) and adopted by the wider public.
Although there are no official estimates of how many women ingest their placenta after delivery, the internet is increasingly crowded with placenta service providers preparers of pills, smoothies, and salves to support new mothers in the slog to recovery. But the purported benefits are disputed. Depending on whom you ask, placenta-eating is either medicine or a potentially dangerous practice based on myth. How did this practice go mainstream, despite a lack of reported scientific or clinical benefits? The answer may say much more about the world new mothers live in than it does about the placenta.
In any doctors office or primary care setting, a provider treating a patient will often mention new research that supports a recommended treatment. A pregnant woman diagnosed with preeclampsia, for example, might learn from her health care provider that low-dose aspirin has been shown in recent studies to reduce serious maternal or fetal complications. But the basis for placentophagy, a practice that lies beyond the boundaries of biomedicine, is a 16th-century text.
Li Shizhens Compendium of Materia Medica, or Bencao gangmu, first published in 1596, is a Chinese pharmacopoeia and the most celebrated book in the Chinese tradition of pharmacognosy, or the study of medicinal plants. It appears on the websites of placenta service providers and in the pages of the standard references for practitioners of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), a millennia-old medical system with a growing global reach.
The basis for placentophagy, a practice that lies beyond the boundaries of biomedicine, is a 16th-century text.
A physician and herbalist, Li drew on his empirical experiences treating patients but also on anecdotes, poetry, and oral histories. His encyclopedia of the natural world is a textual cabinet of natural curiosities, according to historian Carla Nappis The Monkey and the Inkpot, a study of Lis life and work. Containing nearly 1,900 substances, from ginseng and peppercorn to dragons bone and turtle sperm, Lis book describes dried human placenta as a drug that invigorated people, and was used to treat impotence and infertility, among other conditions. For advocates of placentophagy, this book serves as ethnomedical proof of the long-standing history of the practice and by extension, its efficacy and safety.
But like many claims to age-old provenance, the origins of placentophagy as a postpartum treatment are disputed. Sabine Wilms, an author and translator of more than a dozen books on Chinese medicine, scrutinized classical Chinese texts on gynecology and childbirth and told me theres no written evidence at all of a woman consuming her own placenta after birth as a mainstream traditional practice in China, even if formulas containing dried human placenta were prescribed for other conditions, as described in Lis book.
Beyond Lis 400-year-old encyclopedia, evidence of postpartum placenta-eating is nearly impossible to find in the historical record. Womens voices are notoriously difficult to unearth from the archives, and even in the 19th century, the details of childbirth and what happened to the placenta went largely unreported. But when two University of Nevada, Las Vegas anthropologists pored over ethnographic data from 179 societies, they discovered a conspicuous absence of cultural traditions associated with maternal placentophagy.
The earliest modern recorded evidence of placentophagy appears in a June 1972 issue of Rolling Stone. I pushed the placenta into a pot, wrote an anonymous author, responding to the magazines call asking readers to share stories from their personal lives. It was magnificent purple and red and turquoise. Describing her steamed placenta as wonderfully replenishing and delicious, she recounted eating and sharing it with friends after delivering her son.
Evidence of postpartum placenta-eating is nearly impossible to find in the historical record.
Raven Lang, who is credited with reviving the oldest known and most commonly used recipe for postpartum placenta preparation, witnessed placentophagy while helping women as a homebirth midwife and TCM practitioner in California in the early 1970s. These women lived off the land, she explained, and might have drawn inspiration from livestock and other animals in their midst.
It wasnt long before placentophagy made its way beyond Californias hippie enclaves. In 1984, Mary Field, a certified midwife and registered nurse in the U.K., recounted eating her placenta, an unmentionable experience, to ward off postpartum depression after the birth of her second child. I remain secretive, Field wrote, for the practice verges on that other taboo cannibalism as it is human flesh and a part of your own body. She recalled choking down her own placenta. I could not bear to chew or taste it.
The rise of encapsulation technology, developed for the food industry and picked up by placenta service providers in the early aughts, put an end to visceral experiences like Fields. No longer must women process their own placenta or subject themselves to its purported offal-like flavor. Tidy, pre-portioned placenta pills resembling vitamins can be prepared by anyone with access to a dehydrator, basic supplies, and online training videos.
The boom in placentophagy highlights a longstanding puzzle for researchers. Almost every non-human mammal consumes its placenta after delivery, for reasons that remain unclear to scientists. Why did humans become the exception to this nearly universal mammalian rule? For Daniel Benyshek, an anthropologist and co-author of the UNLV study that found no evidence of placentophagy being practiced anywhere in the world, the human exception raises a red flag: It suggests the reasons that humans have eschewed placentophagy arent just cultural or symbolic, but adaptive that theres something dangerous about it, or at least there has been in our evolutionary history.
Scientific data on the potential benefits and risks of placentophagy is scarce, but a few small studies suggest that any nutrients contained in cooked or encapsulated placental tissue are unlikely to be absorbed into the bloodstream at concentrations large enough to produce significant health effects. Whether and in what quantity reproductive hormones such as estrogen survive placental processing has been little studied, but ingesting them after birth could have negative effects on milk production and may also increase the risk of blood clots.
Almost every non-human mammal consumes its placenta after delivery, for reasons that remain unclear to scientists.
Yet placental encapsulation services which remain unregulated in the U.S. have found a receptive audience of American consumers. (The food safety agency of the European Union declared the placenta a novel food in 2015, effectively shuttering the encapsulation business on the continent.) Mostly small and women-owned, placenta service businesses position themselves as an alternative to a highly medicalized, bureaucratized birthing process that has often neglected the needs of women. Postpartum checkups focus narrowly on pelvic examinations and contraceptive education. One survey of U.S. mothers found that one in three respondents who received a postpartum checkup felt that their health concerns were not addressed. In contrast, placenta service providers speak the language of empowerment.
That language can resonate with new mothers like Brumfield, who face overwhelming pressures to care for a newborn, nurse on demand, manage a household, and return to work amid anxieties about postpartum depression, dwindling energy, and inadequate milk supply.
In some ways, placenta consumption is motivated by a desire to perform good mothering, wrote scholars from Denmark and the United States in a paper on the emergence of the placenta economy. It reflects the idea of maternity as a neoliberal project, in which new mothers are responsible for their own individual well-being as well as that of their babies, they added.
Meanwhile, rates of postpartum depression keep climbing, maternity leave policies are stingy, and child care costs are often prohibitive. Its easy to see why many women would be eager to seek help, real or perceived, wherever they can find it.
Daniela Blei is a historian, writer, and book editor based in San Francisco.
The rest is here:
Medicine or Myth? The Dubious Benefits of Placenta-Eating - Undark Magazine
- Yes, But. The Annotated Atlantic. - November 7th, 2009 [November 7th, 2009]
- Health Insurance Benefit Costs by Region - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- For an Operator, Please Press... - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Pollyanna With a Pen: Maine Governor Signs 18 New Health Care Bills into Law - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- AMA Sounds the Alarm, Medicare Making Yet Another Attempt to Cut Reimbursement - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Mass Governor Asks Blue Cross to Keep Higher Employer Contribution - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Lifespan and Care New England Plan Monopoly (Again) - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Dirigo Health: Con Artists, Liars, and Thieves? - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- New Orleans: Health Challenges - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- August a Flurry of Activity - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Maine's Dirigo Health Savings One-Third of Original Estimate - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- “Methodolatry”: My new favorite term for one of the shortcomings of evidence-based medicine - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Suzanne Somers’ Knockout: Dangerous misinformation about cancer (part 1) - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- A science-based blog about GMO - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- A Not-So-Split Decision - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Military Medicine in Iraq - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- The effective wordsmithing of Amy Wallace - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- A Science Lesson from a Homeopath and Behavioral Optometrist - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Join CFI in opposing funding mandates for quackery in health care reform - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Mainstreaming Science-Based Medicine: A Novel Approach - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Those who live in glass houses… - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- J.B. Handley of the anti-vaccine group Generation Rescue: Misogynistic attacks on journalists who champion science - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- When homeopaths attack medicine and physics - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- The cancer screening kerfuffle erupts again: “Rethinking” screening for breast and prostate cancer - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- All Medicines Are Poison! - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- When Loud Wins: Will Your Tax Dollars Pay For Prayer? - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- It’s All in Your Head - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- The Skeptical O.B. joins the Science-Based Medicine crew - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- The Tragic Death Toll of Homebirth - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- What’s the right C-section rate? Higher than you think. - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Recombinant Human Antithrombin – Milking Nanny Goats for Big Bucks - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- Does C-section increase the rate of neonatal death? - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- Man in Coma 23 Years – Is He Really Conscious? - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- Why Universal Hepatitis B Vaccination Isn’t Quite Universal - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- Ontario naturopathic prescribing proposal is bad medicine - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- Naturopaths and the anti-vaccine movement: Hijacking the law in service of pseudoscience - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- The Institute for Science in Medicine enters the health care reform fray - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- Neti pots – Ancient Ayurvedic Treatment Validated by Scientific Evidence - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- Early Intervention for Autism - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- A temporary reprieve from legislative madness - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- A critique of the leading study of American homebirth - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- Lose those holiday pounds - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- Endocrine disruptors—the one true cause? - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- Acupuncture for Chronic Prostatitis/Chronic Pelvic Pain Syndrome - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- Evidence in Medicine: Experimental Studies - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- Midwives and the assault on scientific evidence - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- The Mammogram Post-Mortem - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- An Influenza Recap: The End of the Second Wave - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- The End of Chiropractic - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- Cell phones and cancer again, or: Oh, no! My cell phone’s going to give me cancer! (revisited) - December 20th, 2009 [December 20th, 2009]
- Another wrinkle to the USPSTF mammogram guidelines kerfuffle: What about African-American women? - December 20th, 2009 [December 20th, 2009]
- Acupuncture, the P-Value Fallacy, and Honesty - December 20th, 2009 [December 20th, 2009]
- The One True Cause of All Disease - December 20th, 2009 [December 20th, 2009]
- Communicating with the Locked-In - December 20th, 2009 [December 20th, 2009]
- Are the benefits of breastfeeding oversold? - December 20th, 2009 [December 20th, 2009]
- Measles - December 20th, 2009 [December 20th, 2009]
- Radiation from medical imaging and cancer risk - December 21st, 2009 [December 21st, 2009]
- Multiple Sclerosis and Irrational Exuberance - December 21st, 2009 [December 21st, 2009]
- Medical Fun with Christmas Carols - December 22nd, 2009 [December 22nd, 2009]
- Lithium for ALS – Angioplasty for MS - December 23rd, 2009 [December 23rd, 2009]
- “Toxins”: the new evil humours - December 24th, 2009 [December 24th, 2009]
- 2009’s Top 5 Threats To Science In Medicine - December 24th, 2009 [December 24th, 2009]
- Buteyko Breathing Technique – Nothing to Hyperventilate About - December 26th, 2009 [December 26th, 2009]
- The Graston Technique – Inducing Microtrauma with Instruments - December 29th, 2009 [December 29th, 2009]
- The “pharma shill” gambit - December 29th, 2009 [December 29th, 2009]
- Ginkgo biloba – No Effect - December 30th, 2009 [December 30th, 2009]
- Oppose “Big Floss”; practice alternative dentistry - January 1st, 2010 [January 1st, 2010]
- Causation and Hill’s Criteria - January 3rd, 2010 [January 3rd, 2010]
- The life cycle of translational research - January 10th, 2010 [January 10th, 2010]
- The anti-vaccine movement strikes back against Dr. Paul Offit - January 10th, 2010 [January 10th, 2010]
- Osteoporosis Drugs: Good Medicine or Big Pharma Scam? - January 10th, 2010 [January 10th, 2010]
- Acupuncture for Hot Flashes - January 10th, 2010 [January 10th, 2010]
- The case for neonatal circumcision - January 10th, 2010 [January 10th, 2010]
- A victory for science-based medicine - January 10th, 2010 [January 10th, 2010]
- James Ray and testosterone replacement therapy (TRT) - January 10th, 2010 [January 10th, 2010]
- The Water Cure: Another Example of Self Deception and the “Lone Genius” - January 12th, 2010 [January 12th, 2010]
- Be careful what you wish for, Dr. Dossey, you just might get it - January 13th, 2010 [January 13th, 2010]
- You. You. Who are you calling a You You? - January 15th, 2010 [January 15th, 2010]
- The War on Salt - January 16th, 2010 [January 16th, 2010]
- Is breech vaginal delivery safe? - January 16th, 2010 [January 16th, 2010]