Have you ever heard of this? UGH!!!!

muffie, RN · Jul 22, 2007

oh my ...

to each their own :uhoh21:

Super Nurf · Jul 23, 2007

not being judgemental or anything but Ewwwww!

medsurgnurse, RN · Jul 23, 2007

i'm confident if you cooked placenta, it would be safe.
perhaps with bacon and onions?
leslie

or some fava beans and nice chianti.......

ssakd · Jul 23, 2007

i dont work in Obs'gyn,but my colleagues tell me of parents who request for the placenta for some family rite,but i havent heard of anybody eating it.

jitterbugg · Jul 23, 2007

yep, i've been a part of this. my mother who i thought was a normal white woman, wanted the placenta of my 2nd sister. it sat in our freezer in a garbage bag for months before she decided to burry it. i don't think she ever researched 'how to dry it' or anything about it for that matter, but she always tried to convince me that it was packed full of vitamins and how she should eat it. (my guess is...she heard it...and she believed it. no thanks!

Warpster · Jul 23, 2007

Aw, darlin', I guess you just weren't around in the 60s. I once had a hippie cookbook that gave a recipe for placenta stew. No, I was not interested in trying it.

I know of quite a few tribal cultures that have ritual surrounding the disposal of the placenta, and a few others that use it for a ritual first meal after a woman has given birth.

While I don't consider it much of a souvenir, I do recognize that other people do have feelings and traditions concerning it, so I find it incredibly odd that a woman had to go to court to keep it.

We don't know if ingesting it prevents complications in humans because the studies have apparently been too icky doodle to get funding.

bluiis923 · Jul 25, 2007

There was a similar thread on this subject a while back. I saw a show on HBO or the discovery channel about a woman who took her placenta home and had a party for the baby. She prepared a pate with it and served it on crackers.

I'm sorry but I would have to beat somebody to death that served me pate made from placenta.... just my 2 cents worth... :down:

KellNY, RN · Jul 25, 2007

my mother who i thought was a normal white woman

and you came to find out that she was a normal black woman? :uhoh21:

ftr-all the women i've known irl and on the computer who've done this have been "normal" (hate that term!) white women.

fronkey bean · Jul 25, 2007

Ah, yes, but only if applying the "drug" part of Food and Drug Administration. Anything that is sold or given away as a "food" also has to meet standards. And, well.....I guess this would be a "food" as well as "drug" (if you believe the claims) so yes, the FDA would be called into play.

I know that the FDA would still be involved but the standards for a "dietary supplement" are a lot less stringent then for a drug. I am pretty sure you only have to show that a dietary sup. isn't harmful, it doesn't have to actually live up to any claims it makes as long as there is a disclaimer on the bottle that it isn't a drug.

zumalong · Jul 25, 2007

This is the exact reason why at 22 years of age and having completed maternity nursing---I never went into maternity nursing. My patient's whole family came in with this huge platter of what looked like homemade volcano bread--It was little susie's previous home for the last 40 weeks.

I could not get off that floor soon enough!!!:monkeydance:

Chaya, ASN, RN · Jul 25, 2007

or some fava beans and nice chianti.......

Well, if my memory serves from my earth child days, the articles always said it tasted like liver! (That alone would have kept me from trying it)

MB37 · Jul 25, 2007

I'm still a student, and just took patho, so we just learned about Kuru a month or 2 ago. It was the first thing that popped into my head when I read that article, so I just dug out my notes. Per my professor: Kuru was noted in tribes of Papua New Guinea who ate the brains of their dead. Prion diseases are so rare they don't know much about them, but researchers believe they may be the basis for many cultures' taboos against cannibalism. I would definitely stay away from consuming CNS tissue, of human or any other source - and aside from the ew-factor, probably would avoid any human tissue just to be safe. Oh, and just did a search - here's an article about prion diseases that mentions the placenta as a possible route of transmission. More research is needed, but I'd rather not be the guinea pig. All these diseases have a several year incubation, have 100% mortality, and prions are not killed by autoclaving or other sterilization techniques.

http://www.renderers.org/links/Introduction%20To%20BSE-BOOKLET%203-21-01%20Don%20Franco1.htm