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    Of birthing and the bizarre: freeze-dried placenta

    By Susan Perry | Published Fri, Jul 10 2009 9:00 am

    As I write this, I’m on baby watch, ready to go into action as my daughter’s unofficial doula at the birth of her first child.

    It’s also Friday, the day of the week when I prefer to post on health topics that are out-of-the-ordinary or perhaps even a bit weird.

    So with babies, birthing and the bizarre on my mind, I can’t resist sending those of you MinnPost readers with a sense of humor and a strong stomach to Joel Stein’s very funny piece in Time magazine last week about his wife’s desire to do something unusual (but not unheard of) with her newborn baby’s placenta.

    But you should get the details from Stein:

    There is so much you can't know about your spouse when you get married, like that one day she will want to eat her placenta. But there are two things you don't argue about with a pregnant woman: what she eats and that being full of life indeed looks sexy. So when Cassandra told me that for $275, a woman would come to our house, cook Cassandra's placenta, freeze-dry it and turn it into capsules to help ward off postpartum depression and increase milk supply, I said, "$275 is a bargain compared with the $20,000 I'll have to spend to tear out our kitchen immediately afterward."

    It’s an amusing article, and comes with a video of the "professional placenta chef" in action in Stein’s kitchen. (When Stein sees the umbilical cord on his kitchen counter, he quips, "It looks just like pasta.")

    Are there any MinnPost mothers out there who’ve done something similar with their baby’s placenta? If so, let us know in the comment section.

    Oh, and for the record: When I asked my daughter if she had such plans, she looked at me strangely and said, "Absolutely not." Good, because I don't have a food dehydrator.

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    Susan Perry

    In "Second Opinion" Susan Perry will coordinate coverage to help MinnPost readers make their way through the thicket of health happenings, trends, studies and research. Perry has written several health-related books, and her articles have appeared in a wide variety of publications, including Minnesota Monthly, The History Channel Magazine and Woman's Day. She is a former writer/editor for Time-Life Books and a former editor of Nutrition Action Healthletter, published by the Center for Science in the Public Interest. Perry can be reached at sperry [at] minnpost [dot] com.

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