The Placenta: The Magical Organ That Nourishes Life
The placenta is often overlooked in conversations about birth. We spend months preparing for the baby, learning about labor, choosing where we will give birth, and imagining the moment we finally meet our little one. Yet the remarkable organ that makes much of that journey possible often receives very little attention.
The placenta is temporary, extraordinary, and deeply interconnected with both parent and baby. It grows during pregnancy, performs an astonishing number of functions, and then, after the baby is born, is released from the body.
It is also much more than a biological object.
Across cultures, people have recognized the placenta as something worthy of care, ceremony, reverence, and sometimes medicine. Placentas have been buried, burned, planted beneath trees, protected through ritual, returned to ancestral land, and incorporated into postpartum traditions. In some traditions, the placenta has been consumed or prepared medicinally.
These practices are incredibly diverse, and they should not be reduced to the modern claim that “people have always eaten their placentas.” The historical record is much more complicated than that. In many cultures, the placenta was not consumed at all. Instead, its importance was expressed through how carefully it was treated after birth.
Today, some families choose to encapsulate their placenta, while others bury it, make art from it, donate it, hold a ceremony, or simply spend a moment acknowledging the organ that nourished their baby.
Learning about the placenta gives us an opportunity to explore both the extraordinary biology of birth and the many ways humans have understood the sacredness of this temporary organ.
What Is the Placenta?
The placenta is a temporary organ that develops in the uterus during pregnancy. It forms from cells associated with the developing pregnancy and becomes an intricate interface between the pregnant person’s body and the developing baby.
Connected to the baby through the umbilical cord, the placenta performs many functions that are essential to pregnancy.
It facilitates the exchange of oxygen, nutrients, and waste products between the pregnant person’s blood and the baby’s blood. It produces hormones that regulate pregnancy and prepare the body for birth and lactation. It also plays important roles in immune regulation, metabolism, and protecting the developing baby from some potentially harmful substances.
It is difficult to find a perfect comparison for the placenta because it isn’t simply one organ doing one job.
It is, in many ways, an entire temporary biological system.
A Lifeline Between Parent and Baby
The placenta allows oxygen and nutrients from the pregnant person’s circulation to reach the baby while helping move carbon dioxide and other waste products away from the baby’s circulation.
Importantly, the two circulations normally remain separate. Blood from the pregnant person and blood from the baby do not simply flow together inside the placenta. Instead, the placenta creates an incredibly intricate exchange surface where oxygen, nutrients, hormones, antibodies, and waste products can cross between the two circulations.
The placenta is therefore both connection and boundary.
A Hormone-Producing Organ
The placenta is also an extraordinary endocrine organ.
Among the hormones it produces are:
Human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG) — supports the pregnancy during its early stages and is the hormone detected by most pregnancy tests.
Progesterone — helps maintain the uterine environment needed for pregnancy.
Estrogens — support uterine growth, blood flow, breast development, and many of the physiological changes of pregnancy.
Human placental lactogen (hPL) — contributes to changes in the pregnant person’s metabolism and helps make nutrients available to the developing baby while also preparing the body for lactation.
The placenta is therefore not simply nourishing the baby. It is actively communicating with and transforming the pregnant person’s body.
An Immune Interface
The placenta also participates in the extraordinarily complicated relationship between the maternal immune system and the developing baby.
The baby is genetically different from the pregnant parent, yet pregnancy normally allows the two to coexist for months without the pregnant person’s immune system rejecting the pregnancy.
The placenta contributes to this process through physical barriers, immune signaling, and specialized cells and molecules that help regulate the maternal-fetal interface.
It also allows certain maternal antibodies to cross to the fetus, helping provide the newborn with passive immune protection during the early months of life.
At the same time, the placenta is not an impenetrable shield. Some viruses, medications, drugs, alcohol, and other substances can cross the placenta, which is one reason exposures during pregnancy can matter so profoundly.
The Placenta in the Mammalian World
There is another fascinating piece of the placenta story that is easy to overlook:
Many mammals eat their placenta.
Placentophagy—the consumption of the placenta and other components of the afterbirth—is widespread among nonhuman mammals. It has been observed across a remarkable range of species, including rodents, carnivores, herbivores, and nonhuman primates.
It isn’t universal, and different species interact with the afterbirth in different ways. But its widespread occurrence has led scientists to ask an intriguing question:
Why would eating the placenta have evolved in so many mammals?
There may not be one answer.
One possibility is remarkably practical: cleanliness and predator avoidance.
For an animal giving birth in a den, nest, or exposed environment, birth produces blood, fluids, membranes, and a placenta. Consuming the afterbirth may remove some of the physical evidence and scent of birth that could attract predators.
There may also be nutritional benefits. The placenta contains proteins, iron, minerals, and other biological compounds. For an animal that has just undergone pregnancy and birth, consuming nutrient-rich tissue provides an immediate source of food.
But researchers have become particularly interested in another possibility: the physiological effects of placentophagy on the mother.
Animal research, particularly in rodents, suggests that consuming placenta and amniotic fluid around birth can influence endogenous opioid systems and pain responses. Researchers have investigated a proposed substance called placental opioid-enhancing factor (POEF), which appears to enhance opioid-mediated pain responses in some animal models.
There are also hypotheses involving maternal behavior and the transition from pregnancy to caring for offspring.
These findings are fascinating—but they are animal findings.
And that distinction matters.
Does This Mean Humans Are Supposed to Eat Their Placentas?
Not necessarily.
The fact that another mammal does something does not, by itself, tell us that the behavior is necessary or beneficial for humans.
Humans are mammals, and our biology shares deep evolutionary roots with other mammals. But human behavior is also profoundly shaped by culture, environment, technology, social structures, and learned traditions.
And when researchers have looked for evidence of human placentophagy across cultures, they have found something surprising.
A cross-cultural study examining 179 human societies found that maternal placentophagy was remarkably absent from the ethnographic record, despite the widespread occurrence of placentophagy among other mammals. Researchers found many different cultural practices surrounding the placenta—including burial, ritual treatment, and beliefs about its relationship to the child—but comparatively little evidence of mothers routinely eating their own placentas.
That doesn’t mean humans have never eaten placenta.
They have.
There are documented examples of human placentophagy and medicinal placenta use, and modern Western placentophagy has become increasingly visible in recent decades. But the evidence does not support the popular claim that humans have universally or routinely eaten their placentas throughout history.
This creates a fascinating evolutionary and cultural question.
Other mammals often consume the placenta. Humans have often done something else: we have made meaning from it.
We have buried it.
Returned it to the earth.
Placed it beneath trees.
Connected it with ancestry and homeland.
Protected it through ritual.
Used it medicinally in some traditions.
And, in some places and circumstances, consumed it.
Perhaps there is no single “natural” human response to the placenta.
Perhaps what is distinctly human is our tendency to recognize that the placenta represents something more than its physical material.
The Placenta as Sacred
There is something striking about the way placenta traditions appear across such different cultures.
The details are enormously varied, but the underlying recognition—that the placenta deserves special treatment—is remarkably common.
In many traditions, the placenta is not considered disposable.
It may be understood as connected to the baby, the mother or birthing parent, ancestors, the land, or the transition between pregnancy and life outside the womb.
Returning the Placenta to the Earth
One of the most beautiful and widespread themes in traditional placenta practices is returning the placenta to the earth.
Among Māori communities, the placenta—whenua—has profound significance. The same word is used for land, creating a powerful linguistic and cultural connection between the placenta and the earth to which a person belongs.
Burying the placenta can therefore represent a child’s relationship with their people, homeland, and ancestral land.
Among Diné (Navajo) communities, traditional practices surrounding the placenta and umbilical cord have also connected the child with homeland, family, and belonging.
Elsewhere, placentas have been buried beneath trees, near homes, or in places carrying particular cultural or spiritual significance.
Sometimes a tree is planted over the burial place, creating a living symbol of the child’s growth.
These practices are not evidence that placenta burial has a particular medical effect. They tell us something different:
The placenta has been understood by many communities as meaningful rather than disposable.
The Placenta as a Relationship to Place
Perhaps one of the most beautiful ideas found in placenta traditions is that the placenta can represent a child’s relationship with the earth.
The placenta literally nourishes a baby from within the body, and after birth it can become a symbolic bridge between the child and the land.
In this understanding, birth isn’t only an event between parent and baby.
It is also an event between a family and a place.
The Chinese Medicine Tradition of the Placenta
Traditional Chinese medicine offers one of the clearest historical examples of the placenta being used medicinally.
Human placenta has been described as Zi He Che (紫河车), commonly translated as “Purple River Vehicle.” Historical Chinese medical texts describe processed human placenta as a medicinal substance, with references dating back many centuries.
In traditional Chinese medicine, Zi He Che was not simply considered a postpartum supplement for the person who had given birth. It was used as a medicinal substance within a broader framework of deficiency, vitality, reproductive health, and restoration.
This distinction matters.
It is common to hear that modern placenta encapsulation is an “ancient Chinese postpartum tradition.” That claim is more confident than the historical evidence allows.
Traditional Chinese medicine absolutely has a longstanding medicinal tradition involving human placenta.
Modern postpartum placenta encapsulation, however, is a much newer practice.
The contemporary TCM method of placenta encapsulation—generally involving steaming the placenta with warming ingredients such as ginger, followed by dehydration and encapsulation—draws inspiration from this traditional medicinal framework, but should not be presented as an unchanged ancient postpartum ritual.
That doesn’t make the practice meaningless.
It simply makes its history more interesting and more honest.
Modern Placenta Encapsulation
Modern placenta encapsulation has become increasingly popular in Western birth culture.
The basic process involves preparing the placenta, dehydrating it, grinding it into a powder, and placing that powder into capsules.
There are several approaches to processing placenta, but two are particularly common in contemporary encapsulation practices: raw/dehydrated and steamed/TCM-style.
The Raw Method
With a raw method, the placenta is generally cleaned, sliced, dehydrated, ground, and encapsulated without first being steamed.
The rationale often given for this approach is that avoiding steaming may preserve more of the placenta’s naturally occurring heat-sensitive hormones and other biological compounds.
There is some scientific basis for the idea that processing changes these compounds.
Laboratory research comparing raw, dehydrated, and steamed/dehydrated placenta has found that processing can reduce concentrations of several hormones, with steaming producing greater reductions for some compounds.
This gives the raw method a biological rationale for preserving more of the original placenta.
But this is where it is important to separate a biological possibility from a demonstrated clinical benefit.
We do not currently have good human clinical evidence showing that raw placenta capsules improve postpartum recovery, milk production, mood, iron status, or other outcomes more effectively than steamed placenta.
In other words:
Raw processing may preserve more biological compounds. We do not yet know whether that translates into meaningful postpartum benefits.
The TCM or Steamed Method
The TCM-style method generally involves steaming the placenta before dehydrating and encapsulating it. Ginger and other warming ingredients may be incorporated according to the individual practitioner’s approach.
From a traditional Chinese medicine perspective, cooking and warming foods and medicinal substances can be understood very differently from simply “destroying nutrients.”
Postpartum care in Chinese medicine has traditionally emphasized restoration, nourishment, warmth, and protection from depletion.
The modern TCM placenta method reflects some of these principles.
From a biomedical perspective, however, steaming also changes the chemical composition of the placenta. Heat-sensitive hormones may be reduced.
At the same time, the heat step provides an additional microbial-reduction process compared with processing a placenta without steaming.
Neither method should be described as sterile, and neither method has been proven to provide specific postpartum health benefits.
The two methods therefore reflect different priorities:
Raw: prioritize minimizing heat exposure and preserving more of the placenta’s original biological compounds.
Steamed/TCM: incorporate a traditional warming preparation and an additional heat-treatment step while accepting greater alteration of heat-sensitive compounds.
Neither approach currently has sufficient clinical evidence to establish that it is superior.
What Does the Research Actually Say?
This is where conversations about placenta encapsulation can become confusing.
There are many stories from parents who say their placenta capsules helped them feel more energetic, supported their milk supply, improved their mood, or helped them feel more connected to their birth.
Those experiences are real experiences.
But individual experiences cannot tell us whether the placenta itself caused the improvement.
To understand that question, researchers need controlled studies.
And so far, the evidence is limited.
Hormones
Researchers have found hormones and other biologically active compounds in placental tissue and in processed placenta capsules.
A laboratory study comparing processing methods found that dehydration and steaming alter the concentrations of hormones in placenta.
This supports the idea that how a placenta is processed matters biologically.
However, detecting a hormone in a capsule does not automatically mean that taking the capsule produces a meaningful physiological effect.
We need to know how much survives digestion, how much is absorbed, whether it reaches biologically meaningful concentrations, and whether those concentrations actually affect postpartum physiology.
Those questions remain incompletely answered.
Breastfeeding
One of the most commonly claimed benefits of placenta consumption is increased milk production.
Controlled research has not demonstrated a clear improvement in lactation outcomes from placenta capsules.
A randomized placebo-controlled trial found no significant difference in prolactin levels or infant weight gain between participants consuming steamed/dehydrated placenta capsules and those receiving placebo capsules.
Importantly, this study tested a steamed preparation. It does not prove that a raw preparation would have the same result.
That is one of the larger gaps in the research.
Iron
Placenta contains iron, which has led to the idea that eating placenta could help restore postpartum iron levels.
However, randomized research has not demonstrated a meaningful improvement in maternal iron status from placenta capsules compared with placebo.
Again, this doesn’t mean the placenta contains no iron or that it has no nutritional value.
It means that the amount and form of iron delivered through typical encapsulation has not been shown to produce a clinically meaningful improvement in postpartum iron status.
Mood, Fatigue, and Postpartum Well-Being
Mood and energy are among the most commonly reported reasons people choose placenta encapsulation.
Some observational research has found that people who consume their placentas report positive experiences, including feelings of increased energy or emotional well-being.
But observational studies cannot reliably distinguish the effect of the placenta from other factors surrounding postpartum recovery.
Controlled trials have not established placenta encapsulation as a treatment or prevention for postpartum depression, anxiety, fatigue, or other postpartum mood conditions.
This is particularly important because postpartum mood disorders deserve evidence-based care and should never be treated solely with placenta capsules.
The Safety Question
There is another part of the evidence conversation that deserves to be treated with the same honesty: microbial safety.
A placenta is biological tissue, and birth involves exposure to bacteria from the maternal genital tract and surrounding environment. Dehydration and encapsulation should therefore not be described as sterilization.
The CDC has reported a case involving a newborn with recurrent group B Streptococcus infection in which investigators identified the mother’s contaminated placenta capsules as a possible source of exposure. The CDC concluded that placenta capsule preparation does not necessarily eliminate infectious pathogens and advised that mothers and clinicians consider potential risks.
This doesn’t mean that every placenta capsule is contaminated or that everyone who consumes placenta will become ill.
It does mean that “raw” and “dehydrated” should never be equated with sterile, and that processing and handling practices matter.
This is an area where more research and clearer safety standards would be valuable.
So Why Do People Choose Placenta Encapsulation?
The answer may be more complicated than “because it works.”
People make this choice for many different reasons.
Some are interested in the possible biological properties of the placenta.
Some have heard stories from friends or other parents.
Some feel that consuming the placenta is a way of honoring the work it did during pregnancy.
Some experience the process as empowering or emotionally meaningful.
Some simply don’t want an organ that played such an intimate role in pregnancy to be discarded without ceremony.
And for some, placenta encapsulation is part of a larger desire to approach postpartum care through traditional, holistic, or ritual practices.
Those reasons deserve respect even when scientific evidence for a particular physiological claim is limited.
The Sacred and the Scientific Are Not Opposites
This may be one of the most important conversations we can have about the placenta.
We do not have to choose between reverence and evidence.
Traditional knowledge can tell us something about how human communities have understood the placenta, what it has meant, and how people have cared for it.
Science asks different questions.
Science can investigate what is physically present in placental tissue, what happens during processing, what compounds survive, what is absorbed, and whether a particular practice produces measurable health outcomes.
Neither question makes the other meaningless.
The sacredness of the placenta does not depend on a clinical trial.
And at the same time, if we make a claim that placenta capsules prevent postpartum depression, increase milk supply, replace iron, or balance hormones, that claim should be held to the same standard of evidence we would expect for any other health intervention.
We can hold wonder and uncertainty at the same time.
We can honor traditional practices without romanticizing them.
We can appreciate modern science without assuming it has answered every question.
And we can remain curious about what we don’t yet understand.
Honoring Your Placenta
There is no single right way to honor a placenta.
You might choose to:
Have a placenta ceremony
Bury the placenta
Plant a tree or flower over its burial place
Create a placenta print
Photograph or preserve the placenta
Explore placenta encapsulation
Work with a practitioner who incorporates traditional Chinese medicine principles
Ask whether your placenta can be donated for research or medical purposes
Simply take a moment after birth to see it, touch it, and acknowledge what it has done
And sometimes honoring the placenta means doing nothing with it at all.
There is no requirement to consume it for your birth to be connected to tradition.
There is no requirement to bury it for your relationship with the placenta to be meaningful.
There is no requirement to believe that placenta capsules will produce a medical benefit in order to experience encapsulation as a meaningful postpartum ritual.
A Final Thought
The placenta is extraordinary.
It grows temporarily inside the body. It connects two circulations without normally mixing them. It nourishes a developing human being. It produces hormones that transform the pregnant body. It participates in immune regulation. It helps prepare the body for birth and the transition into lactation.
And then, when its work is complete, it leaves the body.
Perhaps it is not surprising that humans have struggled to treat something so extraordinary as ordinary waste.
Across cultures, the placenta has been buried, burned, planted, protected, honored, used as medicine, and sometimes consumed. The meanings attached to these practices differ, but they reflect a recurring recognition that birth leaves behind something worthy of attention.
Modern placenta encapsulation is not an ancient universal tradition. The raw method is not an ancient practice simply because humans have sometimes consumed placenta. And the modern TCM encapsulation protocol should not be confused with the historical medicinal use of Zi He Che.
But the desire to pause, honor the placenta, and ask what should happen to it after birth is part of a much larger human story.
Perhaps the most important thing we can do is resist the urge to turn that story into a simple claim.
We can honor traditional knowledge without romanticizing it.
We can approach science with curiosity without asking it to validate what is sacred.
And we can recognize that something can be biologically extraordinary, culturally meaningful, spiritually sacred, and scientifically uncertain—all at the same time.
The placenta was never merely an afterthought of birth.
It was there from the beginning—quietly nourishing, protecting, communicating, and sustaining life.
Whether you choose to bury yours beneath a tree, encapsulate it, create a ritual around it, donate it, or simply say thank you before letting it go, the choice can be an intentional part of your transition into parenthood.
The placenta may leave the body after birth.
But that doesn’t mean it has to disappear from the story.
References
Coyle, C. W., et al. (2015). Placentophagy: therapeutic claims and human maternal placentophagy. American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology, 213(3), 380.e1–380.e10.
Farr, A., Chervenak, F. A., McCullough, L. B., Baergen, R. N., & Battelli, D. (2018). Human placentophagy: a review. American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology, 218(4), 401.e1–401.e11.
Gryder, L. K., et al. (2017). Effects of human maternal placentophagy on maternal postpartum hormone levels: a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled pilot study. Journal of Midwifery & Women’s Health, 62(1), 68–79.
Gryder, L. K., et al. (2017). Effects of human maternal placentophagy on maternal postpartum iron status: a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled pilot study. Journal of Midwifery & Women’s Health, 62(3), 328–335.
Johnson, C. E., et al. (2018). Human placentophagy: effects of processing method on hormones and other bioactive compounds. Placenta, 67, 56–63.
Selander, J., Cantor, A., Young, S. M., & Benyshek, D. C. (2013). Human maternal placentophagy: a survey of self-reported motivations and experiences associated with placenta consumption. Ecology of Food and Nutrition, 52(2), 93–115.
Selander, J., Cantor, A., Young, S. M., & Benyshek, D. C. (2013). Human maternal placentophagy: effects on postpartum iron status, fatigue, and depression. Women and Birth, 26(3), e46–e51.
Young, S. M., & Benyshek, D. C. (2010). In search of human placentophagy: a cross-cultural survey of human placenta consumption, disposal practices, and cultural beliefs. Ecology of Food and Nutrition, 49(6), 467–484.
Young, S. M., Benyshek, D. C., & Lujan, M. E. (2016). Human maternal placentophagy: a review. Ecology of Food and Nutrition, 55(3), 318–334.
CDC. (2017). Notes from the Field: Late-Onset Infant Group B Streptococcus Infection Associated with Maternal Consumption of Encapsulated Placenta. Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, 66(25), 677–678.
Timmons, L., & Mahdy, H. (2023). Placenta Anatomy and Physiology. StatPearls Publishing.
University of New Mexico Health Sciences. Placenta Donation Program.
Māori traditional knowledge sources concerning whenua (placenta) and whenua (land) and traditional placenta burial practices.
Sources documenting Diné/Navajo placenta and umbilical cord traditions and their relationship to homeland and belonging.
Historical Chinese medical texts documenting Zi He Che (紫河车) / human placenta as a medicinal substance, including Li Shizhen’s Bencao Gangmu (Compendium of Materia Medica).
