People who choose to eat their placenta after birth typically do so in one of three ways: encapsulated as pills, blended raw into smoothies, or cooked into food. Encapsulation is by far the most popular method, but each approach carries safety concerns worth understanding before you decide.
Encapsulation: The Most Common Method
Most people who practice placentophagy have their placenta dehydrated, ground into powder, and packed into supplement capsules. This is the most practical approach and the one with the most available preparation services. There are two main techniques.
The “raw start” method skips cooking entirely. The placenta is sliced thin, dehydrated at a low temperature (typically around 55°C or 130°F), then ground and encapsulated. The second approach, sometimes called the Traditional Chinese Medicine method, involves steaming the placenta before dehydration. Steaming adds a heat step that can reduce some bacteria, though neither method has been validated as reliably safe.
A typical encapsulation yields enough capsules for several weeks of use. People who use this method usually take two capsules a few times per day during the early postpartum period. Most encapsulation is done by independent specialists who come to your home or work from their own kitchen, and there is no regulatory oversight or standardized training required in most places.
Raw Preparation in Smoothies
Some people blend small pieces of raw placenta into fruit smoothies. The typical approach involves cutting the placenta into roughly inch-sized cubes shortly after birth, freezing them, and adding a few frozen chunks to a blender with fruit, juice, or other smoothie ingredients. The strong flavors of berries or bananas mask the taste of the tissue.
Raw preparation carries the highest food safety risk because there is no heat step at all. The placenta is an organ that filters blood and can harbor bacteria, so consuming it uncooked means any pathogens present remain fully intact.
Cooked Into Food
A smaller number of people cook placenta as they would organ meat, sautéing, roasting, or adding it to dishes like stir-fries, stews, or pasta sauces. Cooking at least brings the tissue to temperatures that can kill surface bacteria, similar to preparing liver or kidney. The UK’s food safety advisory body has noted that heating to 70°C (158°F) for at least two minutes is a recognized standard for making raw meat safe, and the same principle would apply to placenta.
What the Placenta Actually Contains
Proponents claim the placenta is rich in nutrients and hormones that aid postpartum recovery. The reality is more modest. A 100-gram portion of raw placenta contains about 5.94 mg of iron, roughly comparable to a serving of beef. It does contain trace amounts of hormones, including progesterone and estradiol, but what survives processing and digestion is a different question.
A randomized pilot trial gave 12 women capsules made from their own dehydrated placenta while 15 women received a placebo. Researchers found small, dose-dependent relationships between the hormone concentration in the capsules and the women’s salivary hormone levels, meaning higher-dose capsules did nudge hormone levels slightly. But these shifts were too small to produce a meaningful difference between the placenta and placebo groups overall. In practical terms, the hormones in placenta capsules don’t appear to reach your system in amounts large enough to matter.
No Proven Benefits for Mood, Energy, or Milk Supply
The claimed benefits of eating your placenta include reduced postpartum depression, better energy, improved milk production, and higher vitamin B12 levels. A matched cohort study published in the Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology Canada tested these claims directly. Researchers compared 28 women who consumed their placenta with 110 matched controls who did not, all of whom had a history of mood disorders. They found no differences in depression scores, sleep and energy measures, vitamin B12 levels, or need for pharmaceutical lactation support between the two groups.
Put simply, the best available evidence shows no measurable benefit from placentophagy for any of the outcomes people most commonly hope to achieve.
Bacterial Infection Risk
The most concrete safety concern comes from a 2016 CDC case report. A newborn in Oregon developed two separate bloodstream infections caused by Group B Strep. After the second infection, doctors discovered the mother had been taking placenta capsules, two capsules three times daily, starting three days after birth. Testing revealed that the bacteria cultured from the capsules were genetically identical to the strain infecting the infant. The CDC concluded that the mother’s capsule use likely recolonized her with the bacteria, which then passed to the baby.
The CDC’s position is direct: the encapsulation process does not reliably kill infectious pathogens, and placenta capsule ingestion should be avoided. This is especially true when the mother was colonized with Group B Strep during pregnancy or when the baby had any early infection.
Dehydration temperatures commonly used in encapsulation (around 55°C) can prevent further bacterial growth once the tissue is dried, but food safety experts have warned that this temperature should not be assumed to kill pathogens already present. Spore-forming bacteria are particularly resistant to low-temperature drying.
Heavy Metal Contamination
The placenta acts as a filter between maternal and fetal blood, which means it accumulates heavy metals over the course of pregnancy. A study analyzing 137 placentas found detectable levels of lead in 35% of samples, with lead showing the highest average concentration among the metals tested. Cadmium and manganese were present in every sample. Chromium appeared in nearly all. Mercury was found in about 31% of placentas, though at very low concentrations.
These levels are small in absolute terms, measured in nanograms per gram of tissue. But the placenta concentrated these metals precisely because the body was trying to keep them away from the baby. Eating the organ reintroduces them.
No Regulatory Standards Exist
Placenta encapsulation services operate outside any food safety or pharmaceutical regulation in the United States and most other countries. There are no required temperatures, no mandated hygiene protocols, no testing for pathogens, and no certification standards. Anyone can offer the service. The quality and safety of what you receive depends entirely on the individual preparer’s practices, with no independent verification.
If you choose to prepare placenta at home in any form, treating it with the same caution you’d apply to raw organ meat is the minimum safety baseline: thorough hand washing, sanitized surfaces, and cooking to at least 70°C (158°F) internally for two minutes or more.