In The News: Department of Anthropology
A study has recently suggested that new mothers consuming placenta pills, following childbirth, will experience little to no effect on their post-partum mood, maternal bonding or fatigue.
Eating the placenta does not prevent postpartum depression, new research reveals.
Many animals eat their placenta after birth. Zoologists know this is to ward off predators, but when the "natural" birth movement took off in the 1960s, believers stated that if animals do it, it must be for a health reason and humans should also.
Ingesting the placenta has become a popular practice among moms, with celebrities like TV personality Kim Kardashian West and actress January Jones claiming that it helps boost energy and deal with postpartum depression.
A study has recently suggested that new mothers consuming placenta pills, following childbirth, will experience little to no effect on their post-partum mood, maternal bonding or fatigue.
When you're expecting your first baby, the amount of conflicting information on pregnancy, childbirth, and parenting out there can be overwhelming. Should you breastfeed or use formula? Co-sleep or not? So many choices are fraught with controversy, but there's one decision that's now easier to make than ever, because there's even more evidence that women shouldn't be eating their placentas, in any form. It's true that many other mammals do so, but whether you're blending it into a smoothie or popping freeze-dried pills, placentophagy offers no benefits to humans, and it can actually be extremely dangerous for both mother and child.
Celebrity socialite Kim Kardashian West says it boosted her energy level. Mad Men’s January Jones touts it as a cure for postpartum depression. But does eating one’s placenta after birth—an apparently growing practice around the globe—actually confer any health benefits? Not really, according to the first in-depth analyses of the practice.
What does research suggesting we should focus on diet, not exercise to lose weight and the evolutionary reason we sleep less as we age have in common?
Much like the weather, some human stomachs change throughout the year. The gut microbes of the Hadza, a hunter-gatherer group in Tanzania, shift dramatically as their diet changes with the seasons, according to new research from Stanford University. When applied on a longer timescale, these trends could explain why industrialized populations have a less diverse set of gut microbes and more chronic disease relative to hunter-gatherer populations.
In a 2016 interview with CNN, Anthony Scaramucci — President Donald Trump's new White House communications director — said that Earth, as well as human history, is just 5,500 years old. But ample evidence exists to prove that the world has been around for much, much longer.
A sound night’s sleep grows more elusive as people get older, but what some call insomnia may actually be an age-old survival mechanism.
Trouble sleeping is a common complaint among older folks, but what if their insomnia traces back to prehistoric times when Grandma and Grandpa were in charge of keeping the cave safe at night?