Holly Madison plans to eat her after birth placenta: Is this a trend worth jumping on?

From weird diets to sipping whisky while giving birth, celebrities do all kinds of strange things when they’re pregnant.

But eating your own placenta is by far one of the weirdest.

Now, like several celebrities before her, nine-month-pregnant Holly Madison says she plans to eat her placenta after she gives birth.

“This might sound gross, but I’m totally planning on having my placenta turned into pills so I can take it after giving birth,” the 33-year-old former Playboy model writes on her blog.

“I heard it helps women recover faster,” she writes. “And I want to recover as fast as I can!”

The former “Girls Next Door” star isn’t the first celebrity to take part in this strange trend, in which a woman’s placenta is cleaned, cooked and processed into capsule-like pills.

“Man Men” starlet January Jones claims that ingesting placenta (called placentophagia) as caplets after her son was born helped her stave off postpartum depression.

“I was never depressed or sad or down after the baby was born,” she tells Glamour. “I’d highly suggest it to any woman.”

And while Jones calls it a “very civilized thing which can help women with depression and fatigue,” she admits she should have kept it to herself because of the controversy it caused.

Throughout pregnancy, the placenta transports blood, oxygen and nutrients from the mother to the baby. It’s been called the “tree of life” for its life-sustaining force.

According to advocates, it keeps on giving even after birth. The most commonly cited benefit of ingesting placenta is that it helps balance hormones, therefore combating postpartum depression. It’s also said to boosts milk production, replenish nutrients and helps the uterus contract.

But, despite testimonies, scientists are still skeptical. A recent study out of Buffalo suggests that it is unknown whether placentophagia will benefit mothers, and even non-mothers and males.

“Most of the assumptions [about human placenta consumption] come from extrapolations from animal work, anecdotes and suppositions,” says Mark Kristal, a behavioral neuroscientist at the State University of New York at Buffalo who researches placentophagia in animals and co-authored the study.

“But none of it comes from scientific data,” he tells the Washington Post.

First-hand reports have also slammed placentophagia.

“In my case, it was a terrible idea. Shortly after my first dose of two pills, I felt jittery and weird. By the next day, after just eight placenta pills, I was in tabloid-worthy meltdown mode, a frightening phase filled with tears and rage,” writes Nancy Redd for the New York Times parenting blog.

“This lasted another couple of awful days before my husband suggested that it wasn’t postpartum mommy madness finally making its appearance, but the hormone-and-goodness-knows-what-else-filled placenta pills.”

While humans are among the only mammals that don’t eat their placenta, Kristal suggests this may be telling in itself.

"The more challenging anthropological question is 'Why don't humans engage in placentophagia as a biological imperative as so many other mammals apparently do?’” he says in a statement.

“Perhaps for humans, there is a greater adaptive advantage to not eating the placenta."