Mum’s placenta pills to banish the baby blues

The 28-year-old invited us into her family home in Ridgeway, Berkhamsted, so we could film her steaming a placenta in a boiling pan before slicing it into thin pieces.

After that comes the dehydration process, which usually takes around eight hours.

Switching to one she prepared earlier, she grinds it into a fine powder, in our video, before pouring it into up to 200 pills.

The £150 batch of pills were produced to order for a client from North London.

“A normal-sized placenta will produce roughly 120 capsules,” Lynnea explains to us. “She had a larger placenta.”

As part of the service, Lynnea’s clients are given ‘umbilical cord mementoes’ – where the cord is dehydrated into a charm shape, often a heart.

She also gives her new mums ‘placenta prints’ – where the shape of the organ is printed in blood onto a sheet of paper as a keepsake.

Mum-of-two Lynnea ate her own placenta after giving birth to her second child, Roman, now three.

She mixed her raw placenta with fruits to take as two smoothies – drinking the first one hour and the second 12 hours after birth.

She also rubbed a piece of the organ into her gums straight after the birth.

The technique made it much easier to produce breast milk for him than for her daughter Sianna, now six, Lynnea claims.

Roman is not too keen on seeing the process take place in the family kitchen.

But Lynnea says: “My daughter has said: ‘When I have a baby, you are going to do my placenta.’

“It is becoming a more common and widely accepted technique and makes mums feel healthy and happy and energised.”

She says ingesting the organ after birth can help women produce more breast milk, bleed less and that it reduces the likelihood of getting post-natal depression.

And the placenta is jam packed full of nutrients, she says.

If pills are not your cup of tea, she can even make your placenta into smoothies for you.

“We are following what mammals do, and mammals eat the whole thing raw after birth,” Lynnea says, “It is quite impossible to overdose on it.

“Mums can take as many pills per day as they feel works for them, but most like to keep them for as long as possible, so they don’t like to take too many too soon.”

Lynnea claims to be the first person in the UK to provide ingestible placentas for new mums.

She is director of the Independent Placenta Encapsulation Network (IPEN), which teaches others how to follow in her footsteps.

For more information on IPEN, visit www.placentanetwork.com