Just because something is natural doesn't mean that it necessarily
offers an advantage and according to new research that includes eating human placentas
There's been a recent surge in interest in Placentophagy
or the practice of eating the Placenta after birth sometimes raw sometimes cooked sometimes dried and packed into capsules.
It's been done in
Some form in the US since at least the 1970s with the belief that eating the placenta can help new mothers recover from childbirth
Prevent postpartum depression and boost the production of breast milk among other things
the popularity the practice has continued to peak in this January Kourtney Kardashian blitzed Instagram with pictures of the pills she had made from her Placenta
after the birth of her third child she posted pictures of the dark brown pills with
Testimonies of their life changing effects along with the hashtag "look it up"
so doctors did
researchers from Northwestern University
Medical school looked up ten different studies of Placenta eating in humans and other animals
Going back to 1950 and found no data to suggest the practice conferred any
Benefits to new mothers. Now it turns out the vast majority of research that's been done on the practice has focused on animals like mice
And dogs, and in all of those cases the effects were inconclusive. The research also found that empirical studies of Placenta eating in humans were
essentially non-existent with just a handful of studies reporting on subjects' personal
impressions of their health after eating their afterbirth.
But since there are no medical guidelines for how a placenta should be prepared or eaten let alone whether it should be done at all
the study also points out that there may actually be unknown risks that come with
eating a part of your own body. The placenta is an organ that forms in the wall of the uterus in the earliest phases of
Pregnancy. It's actually the only organ that the human body forms temporarily and then expels. While in its place
it supplies oxygen and other nutrients to the fetus, produces hormones that stimulate its development, filters out its waste and protects it from bacterial infections.
So while placenta tissue couldn't be more natural the study points out that it's been found to contain toxins like selenium,
mercury, lead, and a whole host of bacteria.
so
So placentophagy appears to be yet another case of people thinking that something as
Healthy because it's natural, even though scientists don't have any idea whether it is
Or isn't good for you. But what you know is probably not natural: the recent rash of earthquakes
That's been happening around the Central United States.
That's the conclusion of a major study released this week by the us geological survey which sought to determine whether there's any connection between
Drilling for fossil fuels and earthquakes both of which have been steadily
Increasing in the Central US since the mid 2000s. While previous research has studied the incidence of earthquakes around
Individual wells, the new study looked at more than one hundred and eighty seven thousand oil and gas wells throughout the Central and Eastern US,
Including some in areas that have seen spikes in earthquake activity and some that haven't. And it found that areas with so-called high rate
Injection wells which force high volumes of water into the ground we're nearly twice as likely to experience
Earthquakes as other areas. And these kinds of wells are different from Hydraulic fracturing or fracking wells.
Fracking involves forcing high pressure fluids underground to break up rock formations to release fossil fuels. But the wells studied here are wastewater
Injection wells which take the salt water that's been extracted from the ground along with all that oil and gas and pump it back underground.
Partly to Force out the last traces of oil and partly just to get rid of the water. By mapping these wells and the incidence
Of earthquakes, the study found that 10% of all injection wells had earthquakes of magnitude three or higher
happening within 15 kilometers of them. The correlations were even higher among wells that injected wastewater at the highest rates, more than
300,000 barrels per month. About 61 percent of those wells were associated with earthquakes in their immediate vicinity.
And it's getting worse; until 2000 only about 20% of earthquakes in the region were connected to wells. By 2014 that number had risen to
87%. All while the number of regular
Non-Associated earthquakes stayed about the same. Now exactly why drilling might cause quakes isn't really clear. It could have to do with
Injection wells causing higher pressure underground, or with the salty water acting as a lubricant along small faults.
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