The Placenta Pill Phenomenon: Behind Kim Kardashian West’s Post-Pregnancy Health Obsession

New mother Kim Kardashian West has traded in her energy drinks: She revealed in a post on her app that she has been ingesting her placenta in tablet form since giving birth on December 5 to her son, Saint, as a way to fend off the baby blues. She claims the organ pills give her a “surge of energy” and make her “feel really healthy and good.”

Nearly all nonhuman primates and mammals eat their placentas after birth, and now the practice is having a moment in the realm of humans. First adopted in ancient Chinese remedies, placenta-eating has fans in January Jones and Gaby Hoffmann, and has won over the Oeuf crib–buying, babymooning set. “In L.A. it’s sort of like having a birth doula; everybody does it,” says Vogue’s West Coast contributing editor Lawren Howell, who had placenta pills made after the births of her 2-year-old daughter and 4-year-old son. “They definitely helped me feel stronger.”

Capsules are the most popular form of placenta consumption; a placenta is typically one-sixth to one-fifth of the baby’s weight and will yield somewhere between 80 and 120 pills. When a new mother hires an encapsulation service, the company will send somebody to the hospital to collect the organ before dehydrating and pulverizing it.

Jennifer Mayer, who owns Brooklyn Placenta Services, has encapsulated an estimated 650 placentas over the past five years. “When I went into business, it was the crunchy crowd who was calling me,” says the former birth doula. “Now I’m getting so many calls, my side business has become my full-time job.”

Some women, however, opt to eat the organ dried and blended into a smoothie, or even raw. The latter practice has raised concern among some doctors, like New York ob-gyn Aren Gottlieb, M.D., who says many of her patients have ignored her advice and gone ahead with it anyway. “There’s so little known about it, but it’s not sterile and there’s definitely an infectious risk if eaten raw,” she says.

In all its forms, the practice has won over its share of true believers. “They are my favorite things in the world,” says Melissa Wood, a Manhattan-based model whose son, Benjamin, was born four months ago, of her capsules. “I call them my happy pills.”

Debatable, but then, so are those neon energy drinks.

 

Go behind-the-scenes at the cover shoot with Kim Kardashian, Kanye West, and baby North:

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