The Government Warns Against Eating Your Placenta

Among other dangers, placenta pills could carry dangerous bacteria.

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

Mothers of newborns should not take pills containing their placenta, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned yesterday. The advisory came after doctors linked a newborn’s case of a dangerous infection—called group B Streptococcus agalactiae (GBS) bacteremia—to her mother’s consumption of the baby’s placenta, dehydrated and encapsulated.

The trend of new mothers dosing themselves with placenta pills has taken off in the last few years, with encapsulation companies claiming that consumption of placenta can boost mothers’ energy, help them produce more milk, and ward off postpartum depression. Here’s how it works: After the baby is born, the hospital preserves the placenta—the organ that connects a fetus to the uterine wall and provides nutrition during gestation—for the family to take home. With some services, the family then sends the placenta to a facility for dehydration and encapsulation; other companies send a technician to the home with a food dehydrator and encapsulation supplies. Over the next few weeks, the mother consumes the capsules.  

The pills spiked in popularity in 2015 when Kim Kardashian, then pregnant with her son, Saint, wrote that she planned to take them. “I heard so many stories when I was pregnant with North of moms who never ate their placenta with their first baby and then had postpartum depression, but then when they took the pills with their second baby, they did not suffer from depression!” she wrote. “So I thought, why not try it? What do I have to lose?”

But scientists say there is no evidence to support claims of any health or psychological benefits of consuming the placenta. Furthermore, as this 2016 review in the Journal of Obstetric, Gynecologic, and Neonatal Nursing noted, placenta pills are not regulated—so there’s no way to know what’s actually inside them, or what goes on during the manufacturing process. That leaves women who consume the pills vulnerable to infection, environmental toxins, and exposure to potentially dangerous levels of hormones.

In the case that spurred the CDC’s warning, a newborn who was having trouble breathing was rushed to the emergency room and eventually diagnosed with GBS bacteremia. (Before giving birth, the infant’s mother had undergone a routine test for GBS—it was negative.) After samples from the disease infant’s blood matched ones from the placenta capsules that the baby’s mother had consumed, scientists concluded that the most likely source of the infection was contact with the mother, who had almost certainly contracted the bacteria from the pills but showed no symptoms of the illness herself. Luckily, the infant survived after a hospital stay and an intensive course of antibiotics.

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate