It can feel like every new mommy celebrity out there is naming her newborn something crazy, dropping the baby weight super fast, and of course, eating her placenta.
Some health advocates support placentophagy—the formal name for noshing on your placenta—and claim it can help prevent postpartum depression and bleeding, reduce pain, increase milk supply and energy, and boost the immune system and maternal bonding, among other things. But—and we’ve told you this before—there’s basically nothing out there in the way of scientific evidence, so healthcare professionals and the general public can’t be sure what the impact of placenta-eating truly is on new moms and nursing infants.
That’s why a team at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine decided to take a closer look at the available papers on the topic.
One concern the researchers had going into their review: “The placenta is not sterile, and one function of the placenta is to protect the fetus from harmful exposure to substances,” they write in the new paper, which is published in Archives of Women’s Mental Health. “As a consequence, elements including selenium, cadmium, mercury, and lead, as well as bacteria, have been identified in post-term placental tissues. Due to in utero or post-birth contamination, bacteria or viruses may remain within post-term placental tissues. The potential adverse effects of these components of the placenta on the postpartum consumer and nursing infant are unknown.” Yikes, right?
After performing a broad search for placentophagy-related articles, the researchers narrowed their review down to 10—four human and six animal. (Animal studies were included based on their relevance to humans.) The articles covered everything from online surveys on people’s perceptions of and experiences with eating placenta to a study of placental consumption in rats to a totally dated and not-at-all-adherent-to-current-scientific-standards study from the 1950s about whether or not being fed freeze-dried human placenta increased women’s milk production.
The researchers’ thoughts following their analysis? “Based on the studies reviewed, it is not possible to draw any conclusions relevant to human health,” they write in their paper. “We conclude that the animal and human data strongly support the need for more precise evaluation of the benefit, if any, of placentophagy practices in human patients.”
They even go on to say that more research needs to be done to determine if there are detrimental effects associated with placenta as grub—meaning there’s not enough medical lit out there yet to know if placentophagy is a safety risk.
Remember: Scientific research and medical advice are constantly evolving. The authors of this paper are already at work on a new placentophagy study. Hopefully their article will encourage other researchers to delve further into the topic, as well.