Women are consuming their placenta in pill form for its "health benefits".
/ Courtesy: WEYI
Celebrities are known for starting trends and sometimes doing things a little out of the ordinary.
According to a recent People Magazine article, Mad Men actress January Jones announced that she was eating her own placenta in order to deal with the exhaustion of being a new mom .
The practice has generated lots of buzz on the internet and there are now numerous YouTube clips on the issue.
Some new moms, like Jones, are choosing to eat their own placentas after child-birth for what they believe are its nutritional benefits.
Those that support the practice say it can help with post-pardum depression, milk supply and other child-birth related health issues.
While the placenta can be eaten raw, many are choosing to consume it in capsule form.
"I take the placenta and make sure its drained from all blood before we steam it," placenta encapsulator Stacy Thompson explains.
Then "we are going to take it and slice it into thin slices and put it into the dehydrater," Thompson adds.
After dehydration, Thompson chops it, grinds it into a powder and then uses a capsul machine to turn it into a pill.
"You take 3 two times a day for a week or two. Then 3 once a day for a week then you can take them anytime your feeling sad or down or stressed," new mom Stefani Reder said.
Reder says she chose to take the "placenta pills" despite the concern expressed by her family members.
"They were just like this is disgusting, but if you want to do it we'll stand by your side...I kept explaining to them it's what nourished the baby. So if it's nourishing him, there's gotta be good to it...I want to be able to help myself naturally. I mean there's things you can do, herbs and stuff, but I wanted to be able to put back in what I was already giving him," Reder said.
Critics of the practice says that there is no scientific data to support the "health benefits" of consuming the placenta.
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