Here's Why Mandy Moore Is Eating Her Placenta

Mandy Moore, the 38-year-old This Is Us actress and early 2000s pop singer, has just given birth to a healthy boy named Ozzie. Together with her husband Taylor Goldsmith, this is not their first time at parenthood. Apparently, neither is it their first time to do another thing that made headlines alongside what would’ve been just another celebrity birth: Mandy is eating her placenta.

Known as placentophagy, the practice of ingesting the placenta can be done in pill form — as Mandy is doing — or through traditional cooking, as many that follow Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) methods do. In 1970s California, lotus births emerged to not only encourage eating the placenta raw, but to also keep the umbilical cord attached to the baby until it falls off on its own about 10 days after birth.

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Why do they do it? And should you do it, too? (And if yes, how?!)

The oldest known text about the benefits of eating one's placenta is credited to the 15th-century Chinese herbalist, Li Shizhen. In his manuscript, he details the "invigorating" effects of the placenta to anyone that ingests it -- mother, father, sibling, grandparent, or even stranger. In TCM, eating organs (not always of humans) can clean the blood, replenish essential nutrients, and keep the 'qi,' or life force of a living being, flowing. (Hence, make it anti-ageing.)

In Chinese culture, preparing placenta in a soup is often encouraged to "return" the energy of the mother that she spent on pregnancy and giving birth. If not stewed, it is dried and added to teas, rice, or other dishes. In some Asian households, there are a variety of beliefs, such as feeding it to siblings to strengthen the bond of the family or buried beside a tree, as the placenta is seen as the baby's "guardian" from the womb.

As medical researchers touched on the subject, the practice of dehydrating and turning the placenta into a powder for ingestion through pill form took off in the West. It took away the "cannibalistic" aspects of the tradition and, some practitioners argued, made the effects last longer as the placenta could be taken in microdoses months after giving birth.

While there are no proven medical benefits to ingesting the placenta, many mothers attest to its effects in boosting milk supply, preventing postpartum depression (as it contains the mother's hormones), helping the mother's immune system recover from delivery. The placebo effect can be just as powerful, after all, and if the preparation of the placenta is safe, many parents shrug and say, why not?

According to Mayo Clinic, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has reported a case where a newborn developed a life-threatening Group B Strep infection from breastfeeding due to the mother ingesting her own placenta. The mother had used the placenta encapsulation process of consumption, which involves steaming and dehydration of raw placenta, but Mary Marnach M.D. noted, "These preparations don't completely destroy infectious bacteria and viruses that the placenta might contain."

In India, the Business Standard reported that the unregulated trade of human placenta in the black market posed more of a risk to consumers. They found animal placenta and mishandled human placenta among their posts on second-hand shopping websites. Often, these are picked up from discarded hospital wastes.

Mothers who choose to take home and ingest their own placenta are not breaking any laws, though they are sure to raise some eyebrows whenever they bring it up.

These celebrity moms could care less about what other people think, though. Their bodies, their choice, as the common saying goes. They had the stomach for it, so to speak, and honored their own individuality and power of their decision as mothers and women.