Suffering from the Baby Blues? Try this.

Filed in archive Pregnancy on December 18, 2007

Home remedies are a huge part of life. My grandmother had non-traditional methods for just about every ailment we had growing up. In fact, I don't think I took traditional medicine until I was a teenager. But, the latest unusual is making news.

Placentophagy. What is it? Its when a woman who just gave birth ingests her placenta. Why? To help combat, cope, and fight postpartum depression, or the baby blues, a condition over 80 percent of new moms suffer. According to an article on MSNBC, the unusual practice is not new. A Nevada woman recently fought for the right to get her placenta from a Las Vegas hospital.

New moms who swear by the benefits of consuming their placenta point out that it's a common practice among mammals - and after all, women are mammals, too. But no studies have examined health benefits of human placentophagy, says Dr. Diana Dell, an assistant professor in ob-gyn and psychology at Duke University.

"There's certainly no data," Dell says. "And, truthfully, the only place there may be data is in veterinary journals."

Because the placenta contains estrogen and progesterone, some women believe that the sudden withdrawal of those hormones after the delivery is what causes the baby blues, and that ingesting the afterbirth restores hormone levels.

"The placenta does produce estrogen and progesterone," says Mavis Schorn, the director of the nurse midwifery program at Vanderbilt University School of Nursing. "So the theoretical idea is that it may help, but there's absolutely no research on it."

Schorn also points out that because no research exists for this practice among humans, it's not clear what the cooking or encapsulating does to the nutrients and hormones that are in the blood.