What is it about consuming a human placenta, used for centuries in Traditional Chinese Medicine, that seems to capture our attention?  Other mammals eat their placenta’s immediately after giving birth, only humans have been historically out of sync.

I must qualify that statement, Westerners have been out of sync. Asian cultures have not lost touch with this idea.  There are several thousand Chinese herbs documented in use for over a thousand years.  500-600 hundred are commonly used today and human placenta falls into the commonly used Chinese herb category.  

This growing trend of bringing home a new moms placenta, has been practiced in the East without fanfare.  Moms and grandmothers have known for centuries the health benefits of preparing a placenta with Chinese herbs to help a new mother recuperate from labor and promote lactation.  The placenta is packed with hormones, vitamins, minerals, blood cells and has a wide variety of health benefits.  Most well known may be milk production but if you’ve ever spoken to a mom who has consumed her placenta all tell endless stories about improved energy, faster healing from child birth.

Recently New York Magazine wrote about the latest trend and a new book called “The Placenta Cookbook”.  Congratulations to the author for writing the first cookbook of it’s kind.   Just when we thought every possible food group recipe had been written, this authors delivers something new.  I haven’t seen the book so I’m not sure if she talks about preparing placenta with Chinese herbs. It’s a true skill and not to be undertaken without some training.

I’ve written about Tom Cruise eating placenta before and it has been a popular blog post. Personally I would opt for my placenta made into capsules.  I recommend hiring a qualified dula to prepare the placenta with herbs in accordance with Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM).  The expense is certainly worth it to safety reap all the benefit from your afterbirth.  

Read more on this topic:  

Eating the Afterbirth, A Chinese Medicine Tradition

Dear Friends, Moms, Sisters, Daughters, Aunts & Grandmothers,

We have all been effected by women who have fought breast cancer.

Formaldehyde in hair-straighteners, heavy metals in makeup, phthalates in perfume and parabens in lotion are chemicals linked to cancer and do NOT belong in our everyday cosmetics, yet current law allows it.

That's why many organizations including the  Breast Cancer Fund has been rallying for major change in the cosmetics industry for six years, on behalf of people affected by breast cancer and as a founding partner in the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics.

Now we—and you—have a voice and a vehicle in Congress for truly safe, nontoxic cosmetics. On Friday June 24, 2011,  Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.), Tammy Baldwin (D-Wisc.) and Edward Markey (D-Mass.) introduced the Safe Cosmetics Act of 2011 in the U.S. House of Representatives.

This bill (H.R.2359) would give the FDA the authority it needs to ensure that personal care products are free of chemicals linked to cancer, birth defects, infertility and other serious health problems.

We hope you'll help to move this bill through Congress. 

Sincerely,

Cathy Margolin, L.Ac. Dipl OM

Excuse the short deviation from my usual blogs on Chinese herbs and Traditional Chinese Medicine, (TCM)

The the fact is, everything that is wrong with our food supply and as a result our health, is reflected by McDonald's oatmeal.  Read on! 

Silly, gullible me, when I first heard a radio commercial advertising this new "healthy choice" McDonald's oatmeal, I actually thought it was a great new day and MickeyD's  had seen the light.  

Fail!

How To Make Oatmeal Wrong

By MARK BITTMAN

There’s a feeling of inevitability in writing about McDonald’s latest offering, their “full of wholesome” — also known as oatmeal. The leading fast-food multinational, with sales over $16.5 billion a year (just under the GDP of Afghanistan), represents a great deal of what is wrong with American food today. From a marketing perspective, they can do almost nothing wrong; from a nutritional perspective, they can do almost nothing right, as the oatmeal fiasco demonstrates.

One “positive” often raised about McDonald’s is that it sells calories cheap. But since many of these calories are in forms detrimental rather than beneficial to our health and to the environment, they're actual quite expensive — the costs aren’t seen at the cash register but in the form of high health care bills and environmental degradation.

Oatmeal is on the other end of the food spectrum. Real oatmeal contains no ingredients; rather, it is an ingredient. As such, it’s a promising lifesaver: oats are easy to grow in almost any non-extreme climate and, minimally processed, they’re profoundly nourishing, inexpensive and ridiculously easy to cook. They can even be eaten raw, but more on that in a moment.

Like so many other venerable foods, oatmeal has been roundly abused  by food marketers for more than 40 years. Take, for example, Quaker Strawberries and Cream Instant Oatmeal, which contains no strawberries, no cream, 12 times the sugars of Quaker Old Fashioned Oats and only half of the fiber. At least it’s inexpensive, less than 50 cents a packet on average. (A serving of cooked rolled oats will set you back half that at most, plus the cost of condiments; of course, it’ll be much better in every respect.)

The oatmeal and McDonald’s story broke late last year, when Mickey D’s, in its ongoing effort to tell us that it’s offering “a selection of balanced choices (and to keep in step with arch-rival Starbucks) began to sell the cereal. Yet in typical McDonald’s fashion, the company is doing everything it can to turn oatmeal into yet another bad choice. (Not only that, they’ve made it more expensive than a double-cheeseburger: $2.38 per serving in New York.) “Cream” (which contains seven ingredients, two of them actual dairy) is automatically added; brown sugar is ostensibly optional, but it’s also added routinely unless a customer specifically requests otherwise. There are also diced apples, dried cranberries and raisins, the least processed of the ingredients (even the oatmeal contains seven ingredients, including “natural flavor”).

A more accurate description than “100% natural whole-grain oats,” “plump raisins,” “sweet cranberries” and “crisp fresh apples” would be “oats, sugar, sweetened dried fruit, cream and 11 weird ingredients you would never keep in your kitchen.”

Since we know there are barely any rules governing promotion of foods, one might wonder how this compares to real oatmeal, besides being 10 times as expensive. Some will say that it tastes better, but that’s because they’re addicted to sickly sweet foods, which is what this bowlful of wholesome is.

Others will argue that the McDonald’s version is more “convenient.” This is nonsense; in the time it takes to go into a McDonald’s, stand in line, order, wait, pay and leave, you could make oatmeal for four while taking your vitamins, brushing your teeth and half-unloading the dishwasher. (If you’re too busy to eat it before you leave the house, you could throw it in a container and microwave it at work. If you prefer so-called instant, flavored oatmeal.

If you don’t want to bother with the stove at all, you could put some rolled oats (instant not necessary) in a glass or bowl, along with a teeny pinch of salt, sugar or maple syrup or honey, maybe some dried fruit. Add milk and let stand for a minute (or 10). Eat. Eat while you’re walking around getting dressed. And then talk to me about convenience.

The aspect one cannot argue is nutrition: Incredibly, the McDonald’s product contains more sugar than a Snickers bar and only 10 fewer calories than a McDonald’s cheeseburger or Egg McMuffin. (Even without the brown sugar it has more calories than a McDonald’s hamburger.)

The bottom-line question is, “Why?” Why would McDonald’s, which appears every now and then try to persuade us that it is adding “healthier” foods to its menu, take a venerable ingredient like oatmeal and turn it into expensive junk food? Why create a hideous concoction of 21 ingredients, many of them chemical and/or unnecessary? Why not try, for once, to keep it honest?

I asked them this, via e-mail: “Why could you not make oatmeal with nothing more than real oats and plain water, and offer customers a sweetener or two (honey, the only food on earth that doesn’t spoil, would seem a natural fit for this purpose), a packet of mixed dried fruit, and half-and-half or — even better — skim milk?”

Their answer, via e-mail and through a spokesperson (FMO is “fruit and maple oatmeal”): “Customers can order FMO with or without the light cream, brown sugar and the fruit. Our menu is entirely customizable by request with our 'Made for You' platform that has been in place since the late 90s.”

Oh, please. Houere’s the thing: McDonald’s wants to get people in the store. Once a day, once a week, once a month, the more the better, of course, but routinely. And if you buy oatmeal, they’re o.k. with that. But they know that, once inside, you’ll probably opt for a sausage biscuit anyway.

And you won’t be much worse off.