Placenta Encapsulation

I am Jenn Carlson and for the last 10 years I have been an IT professional and a stage manager until starting my own "show" with my two daughters. I was a high risk mom for both. Their births ignited my passion to help women in labor and promote breastfeeding.  I am a CBI and DONA Trained, Madriella Certified Birth Doula as well as a CPR Instructor.

Placentophagy, or consumption of the placenta, has been reported for decades to help stop the baby blues and diminish postpartum fatigue.  Some women have cooked the placenta in a stew, mixed it into a smoothie, or even taken it raw to tap into its powerful effects.  For many who feel squeamish about this or want to reap the benefits of placenta for more than just a day or two, there is another option: encapsulation.  Powdered placenta has been used in Traditional Chinese Medicine for centuries.  In the postpartum period, placenta capsules can be used to:

• balance your hormones
• enhance your milk supply
• increase your energy

The CDC released a case study on a newborn who had a recurrent GBS infection after the mother had her placenta encapsulated. It has left a lot of people asking if placenta capsules can make your baby sick.

The short answer is: probably not. A well-trained placenta arts specialist will make sure that your placenta is prepared safely for consumption, unfortunately, it seems that this specialist may not have done so. The placenta and the birth should have been assessed to see if it was fit for consumption and then the placenta should have been properly prepared. A maternal or infant infection at or immediately after delivery indicates that an active infection was present. The mother should have been counseled against encapsulation initially. The second major issue, in this case, is that proper food safety protocols may not have been followed. This likely led to the capsules containing GBS bacteria and potentially causing reinfection.

We know that proper steaming and dehydration temperatures will drastically reduce microbial counts thanks to research from Jena University, so even in the case of GBS colonization (not infection), we can confidently say that properly prepared placenta capsules will be safe for consumption.

The mode of the recurrence, in this case, is speculated to be due to the placenta capsules, however, it is impossible to know if that is the case. GBS infections do have a low incidence of recurrence in infants (0.4% to 0.9%). This recurrence has been speculated to be due to exposure to colonized family members or colonized mucous membranes. It is important to note that the mother's milk tested negative for GBS bacteria so the direct route of retransmission (from capsule to mother to milk to baby) was not the mode of recurrence.

In short, this is a case to take seriously, but it is a single case.