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Placenta Eating Offers No Benefit To Mom
Dave Knott writes: While some celebrity moms swear by it and have made it trendy, a new study says that consuming the placenta after birth offers women and their babies no benefit. In fact, the practice — known as placentophagy — may even pose unknown risks to mothers and infants, according to a team from Northwestern University in Chicago, who pored over the accumulated research on the issue. They found no data to support that eating the placenta — either raw, cooked or in pill form — protects against postpartum depression, reduces pain after childbirth, increases a woman's energy, helps with lactation, improves mother-child bonding, replenishes iron in the body, or improves skin elasticity. The researchers also said that there are no studies examining the risks associated with eating the placenta, which acts as a filter to absorb and protect fetuses from toxins and pollutants.
Oddly, Penny Arcade has this covered.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Except that rats have a different fertility cycle from humans. Which makes direct hormonal comparisons pointless.
They are also known to eat their own feces for nutrition. Which makes their gastrointestinal tract quite different.
Concluding presence of direct "medical effects" from these two key differences between species based on a rat study and ignoring the human study is frankly idiotic.
... and wild animals don't waste valuable calories or protein. It's not that the nutrients in the placenta are *especially* good for you, it's just that nutrients period are good for you and hard to come by.
I once went on a winter hike with a park ranger, and he identified some tracks in the snow as coyote tracks. So I naturally asked how he could tell it was a coyote and not a dog being taken for a walk. The answer was that domestic dogs are so well-fed they waste energy running all over the place; coyotes are always on the edge of starvation so they nearly always travel in a perfectly straight line.
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Ok, so I just want to clarify here. I have no feeling one way or the other about this activity.
They are saying that there is no KNOWN benefit to this practice and there COULD BE bad consequences.
So how is that different than saying that there COULD BE benefits but there are no KNOWN bad consequences?
Aren't they really just reporting "We don't know one way or the other"? Except, as usual, the reporting has a slant injected into it.
We should learn what we need to know about issues, before we decide what we need to feel about them.