Woo or True?: Placenta Consumption for Prevention of Post-Partum Depression

This is something I’m experimenting on. I’ve thus far taken a very long creative break from blogging. I have a long list of ideas that I need to actually work out, but this one is my favorite. I call it “Woo or True?”
 

In “Woo or True?” I will discuss a parenting topic I see debated and discussed often and whether or not it is scientifically sound. As per usual, I source as much as I can, and my source list can be found at the very end of this blog. I welcome any and all suggestions for topics. These posts will also be attempted to be kept as a somewhat light read.

I do personally apologize for the LONG break of posts here on Back From Nature. Enjoy!

♥ Maranda

An often underestimated topic in the natural parenting community is placenta consumption. It’s a topic I saw more often than almost any other, and yet it is also one I almost never see discussed on science-based parenting blogs, websites, or groups. I, myself, had wanted to consume mine. I can still recall reading placenta pot roast recipes online. 

“I ate my placenta with some fava beans and a nice chianti”

In fact, there are people with entire careers based on placental encapsulation (the act of steaming, dehydrating and grinding the placenta before putting it into a pill) for new mothers. Mothers, doulas, and midwives of various backgrounds can be found promoting consumption either by cooking it as any other meat, raw, encapsulated, or in smoothies. But where’s the proof? What does placentophagy (the consumption of placenta) supposedly even do? Does it completely prevent the PPD or just alleviate it?

 

What they say it does:

“I truly felt better shortly after taking them--on mornings when I felt sluggish or anxious, I could feel a change in my body after taking the pills.” [1]

“The difference between my first two postpartum periods and the third was simply amazing! Instead of about five days of crying and feeling totally overwhelmed, even paranoid, I experienced one afternoon of teariness and then I was able to recognize that my feelings were related to hormones. I felt more in control than I had with my first babies and so much happier.” [2]

“The placenta is thought to be rich in nutrients that the mother needs to recover more readily from childbirth. . . . Researchers from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) conducted a study that focused on CRH (Corticotropin-Releasing Hormone). . . . They concluded that the placenta secreted so much CRH that the hypothalamus stopped producing it. Once the placenta was born, it took some time for the hypothalamus to get the signal that the CRH levels were low, and to begin producing it again.” [3]*

           Proof that it’s true:

Well, not much.  Like a lot of things in the world of woo, I seemed to find that most of the “proof” of the benefits of placental consumption came from moms all boasting about it to eachother. If you find this to count as evidence, I wish to direct you here.

Listed in my third source above, was a few studies. Now, I had to google it, as their source link was dead, but I did find the 1995 Discover study on CRH and PPD. [4]

Human placenta is also used in traditional Chinese medicine.

Proof that it’s woo:

           Firstly, I’d like to point out that nowhere in the study on CRH and PPD was placental consumption ever discussed or brought up or researched. Not once. Consumption was not part of the study. The conclusion was made, clearly, in the part of the author of the post as well as other placental consumption advocates, who made the conclusion that “If I lose this and get depressed, then when I eat it it’ll make me not depressed.” 

Placental encapsulation businesses are also held to absolutely no standards, guidelines, or rules. There is no body that sets regulations for how a placenta must be handled when encapsulated. As a result, the dangers of having someone take your placenta and encapsulate it are many. They could be throwing your placenta in the toilet, they could be throwing it in the garbage and giving you ground up hair. Dramatic, but truly the risk of strangers without training or mandation on encapsulation.

 “Well,” you may be saying “I’m not having someone else encapsulate my placenta! I will be handling it all on my own!”

In 2012, Michelle Beacock of Edge Hill university conducted a study published in the British Journal of Midwifery that found that evidence of proof behind anecdotes about placental consumption is limited, dated, and ultimately inconclusive. [5]

In 2015, Northwestern University in Illinois conducted a review published in Archives of Women’s Mental Health. The review looked at placenta-consumption related research since 1950 and could not find any data to support the claims that eating the placenta raw, cooked, or in pill form carried any health benefits. Also in the review, was the fact that there are no studies which look at the actual risks of placental consumption. [6]

And do I really have to debunk traditional Chinese medicine?

           So, is it woo or true?

           SURVEY SAYS….. WOO!

           There is nothing current, detailed, and conclusive that supports this idea that placental consumption will prevent PPD. The closest thing to that evidence is anecdote, which as you know, simply is not enough. There are also no studies that address the potential risks.

           Back From Nature, and science, firmly recommend that you do NOT eat your placenta for any reason.

           You wouldn’t eat poop. You wouldn’t eat vomit. You wouldn’t eat your liver. Please, don’t eat your placenta.

SOURCES:

[1]          Milioto, Biba (October 22, 2013)                                http://www.xojane.com/healthy/why-placenta-encapsulation-is-the-smartest-post-partum-decision-i-could-have-made “Why Placenta Encapsulation Is The Smartest Post-Partum Decision I Could Have Made”

 

[2]          Sarah     http://placentabenefits.info/testimonials.asp

[3]          Selander, Jodi                                                    http://placentabenefits.info/medicinal.asp “Placenta for Healing”

* A fun note on this source. While this post discusses the benefits of placenta for healing, including stopping hemorrhaging, preventing PPD, promoting breast milk production, enhancing pain tolerance, etc, there is a disclaimer at the bottom that says: “This site is for informational purposes only. It does not intend to treat, cure, or prevent any disease.” I found this particularly interesting because, while this legal disclaimer claims this is not intended to treat a disease, it seems fairly obvious that is exactly what the intention is. This is one of many examples of truly sneaky practices made by woo-promoters in order to provide bogus health advice without getting sued when it doesn't work.

[4]          Ilona S. Yim, PhD, Laura M. Glynn, PhD, Christine Dunkel Schetter, PhD, Calvin J. Hobel, MD, Aleksandra Chicz-DeMet, PhD, and Curt A. Sandman, PhD (1995)                     http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2768579/ “Elevated Corticotropin-Releasing Hormone in Human Pregnancy Increases the Risk of Postpartum Depressive Symptoms”

[5]          Beacock, Michelle (July 1, 2012)                 http://www.magonlinelibrary.com/doi/abs/10.12968/bjom.2012.20.7.464 “Does eating placenta offer postpartum health benefits?”

[6]          Cynthia W. Coyle, Kathryn E. Hulse, Katherine L. Wisner, Kara E. Driscoll, Crystal T. Clark (October 2015)                Archives of Women’s Mental Health, Volume 18, Issue 5, pp 673-680 http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00737-015-0538-8 (Placentophagy: therapeutic miracle or myth?)  --OR-- http://www.bbc.com/news/health-33006384

 

A Mother's Worth Isn't Measured By Pain

I was in hard labor with my son and my blood pressure was through the roof, thanks to a severe case of late-onset pre-eclampsia. Even after I was given several medicines to bring my blood pressure down, it was still getting dangerously high during contractions, with systolic reading climbing above two hundred. Still, I had my heart set on "natural" labor. When the nurse said that I may need an epidural-- both to control the pain, which was worsening my blood pressure, and to prepare for the possibility of an emergency C-section-- I shook my head in horror.

"But what if the baby thinks I don't love him as much as I love his sister?" I squealed, white-knuckled and in tears through another contraction.

It didn't make sense, but pain and panic will do that. In that moment, I honestly thought that, if I got an epidural with one child and had a natural labor with the other, it would somehow mean that I loved one child less than the other. Fearing a C-section, I ended up consenting to an epidural-- though, as fate would have it, my scoliosis prevented it from working. My son was born a few minutes later, perfect and beautiful. The needle in my back didn't make any difference in the immediate feelings of love that I felt for my son.

Of course, now that the pain and anxiety are behind me, I realize how silly it was that I ever thought that the amount of pain I experienced during labor was somehow a reflection of how much I loved my children. But I can also understand why that thought was there. I had gotten caught up in the culture of birth-shaming that tells women that their willingness to endure unnecessary pain (or not) makes them better or worse mothers. And, though I wouldn't have held anyone else to the same standard, I told myself that I could only be a good mom if I went through unmedicated labor with both of my nine-pound posterior babies.

The feeling followed me through my first few months with my son. I endured an extraordinarily painful surgery to correct trauma from childbirth, and took as low of a dose of pain medication as possible to avoid passing medication to him through breast milk... Even though that meant spending hours of every day for two weeks curled into a ball, sobbing my eyes out and sometimes even involuntarily screaming. Surgical recovery hurt as much as transition-stage labor (something I've experienced twice without medication), yet I endured it because I thought that I would be a bad mother if I exposed my son to pain medication-- or, Sanctimommy forbid, formula.

It didn't end there, and here's where my dangerous commitment to unnecessary pain nearly cost me my life. As I wrote in another article, my doctor repeatedly urged me to wean my son so that I could take the high-dose central nervous system depressants that she said were necessary for controlling my extreme case of postpartum anxiety. But I believed that doing so would make me less of a mother. I felt like breastfeeding was the one thing that I still "had" of my identity as a crunchy martyr of a mom. Even when I became so sick that my lips were blue and I was fainting a dozen times a day, I refused to wean my son because I didn't want to be selfish. As a result, my two children nearly lost me.

Two days ago, my daughter brought up natural childbirth for the first time in her seven years. She asked me why it hurts to have babies. I explained to her that the pain is because a mommy's uterus needs to squeeze very hard to push the baby out, and because the mommy's vagina has to go very quickly from being the size of a nickel to being the size of a watermelon. Here was the convesation that I had once, in my juvenile naivete, somehow expected to be my opportunity to prove my worth as a mother to my kids.

"Can't they give you medicine so it doesn't hurt as bad?" she asked.

"They can," I explained, "But I chose not to. I wanted to be able to experience everything and I didn't want you to be exposed to any medicine that might hurt you."

Somehow, all these years later, it seemed like a pretty pathetic reason to go through that kind of pain when there's an alternativce. She paused for a long time. Where was the applause, the gratitude, that I had somehow expected? And why had I expected it?

"I think I would have taken medicine, if I were you," she said plainly, with a shrug.

Seven years ago, I had expected this conversation to be one about what an amazing mother I was. Seven years ago, I had expected to be able to say, "It was twenty-three hours of labor, and you were backwards, and it hurt so bad that I cried, but I loved you so much that I went through it." Seven years ago, I had thought that this made me an amazing mother. But this was a completely different conversation, and hindsight is 20/20.

"When you have children of your own, that's a completely okay choice for you to make," I said, "Now that I think about it, it's kind of funny that I thought I had to go through a lot of pain just to make myself a good mom."

"I think you'd be a good mom even if you'd taken medicine," she agreed.

And she was right. My value as a mother isn't in how much pain I went through, or how many hours of labor I endured, or how long I breastfed them. My value as a mother is in how many hugs I give, how many stories we read, and how hard I'm willing to fight to keep my kids happy, healthy, and comfortable. I didn't have to go through as much pain as I did. I could have accepted the interventions that could have made labor less stressful and traumatic to me. If I had wanted to, I could have even had a C-section, and it wouldn't have made me less of a mother.

Ultimately, I don't regret my unmedicated births-- my daughter's, which was planned, and my son's, which happened because of a failed but medically indicated epidural. I don't regret them, because my daughter's made me feel empowered and accomplished. It gave me the ability to say that, as young and vulnerable and unprepared for parenthood as I was, I was able to do something that many women can't do. And I don't regret my son's because it taught me that addressing pain can be a medical necessity and that I wasn't selfish for accepting it-- even though, in my unfortunate case, it didn't work anyway. But I am glad that I learned what just might be my most important lesson as a mother: that we can't judge our worth as parents based on how much pain we endure.