Now I'm hungry...
Ingesting the placenta: Is it healthy for new moms?
By Steve Friess, Special for USA TODAY
Debi French was dreading the birth of her fourth child. She wanted the baby, to be sure, but she was terrified of being visited again with the overwhelming despair that came over her in the days and weeks after her last delivery.
French's midwife offered her an unusual remedy: She suggested the expectant mother ingest her own placenta as a means of allaying postpartum depression. The temporary organ was saved, dried and emulsified, then placed in gelatin capsules and taken by the mother in the months after the birth in December 2004.
"Before I actually did it, my friends thought it was weird," says French, 29, of Spokane, Wash., whose fifth child is due in August. "But when they saw how fast I recovered from my birth and they knew my history, they thought it was pretty neat. Now I have a lot of friends planning to do it."
The practice, known as placentophagy, is far from widespread and is received with great skepticism by more traditional medical experts. But among a small but vocal contingent of expectant mothers and proponents, it is strongly believed that the organ created by the woman's body to pass nutrients between mother and fetus and is expelled after birth is rich in chemicals that can help mitigate fluctuations in hormones believed to cause postpartum depression...
There's more to this article, but I came across this and was frankly... stunned. So there.
posted by Roger C. @ 7/19/2007 12:24:00 PM
4 Comments:
postpartum depression...
Another in a long list of made up BS
/flame shield on
Actually, I've heard that this is common in some foreign cultures. Most mammals do it in the wild, by instinct. There's probably something to it.
Animals do it to jump start milk production and to give them a boost of nutrients and such.
Perhaps if it's eaten with fava beans and a nice Chianti...
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