Tom Cruise makes stomachs turn around the globe revealing his plans to eat his baby's placenta.
Tom Cruise makes stomachs turn around the globe revealing his plans to eat his baby's placenta, GQ reports.
The Mission: Impossible III star allegedly told GQ magazine (US): "I'm gonna eat the placenta. I thought that would be good. Very nutritious. I'm gonna eat the cord and the placenta right there."
However, in a subsequent interview with Diane Sawyer, Tom Cruise made light of the comments and denied his plans to eat the placenta.
The placenta is a temporary organ present only in female placental mammals during pregnancy.
The human placenta is usually regarded in Western medicine as nothing more than hospital waste, but it receives ceremonial handling by many cultures around the world.
Among the Navajo Indians of the Southwest, it's customary to bury a child's placenta within the sacred Four Corners of the tribe's reservation as a binder to ancestral land and people.
Bolivian Aymara and Quecha people believe the placenta has its own spirit. It is to be washed and buried by the husband in a secret and shady place. If this ritual is not performed correctly, they believe, the mother or baby may become very sick or even die.
The Ibo of Nigeria and Ghana treat the placenta as the dead twin of the live child and give it full burial rites.
Some cultures, however, promote cooking and eating placenta as a celebration of birth and a source of rich nutrients. Preparing the placenta for consumption by mothers is considered traditional among Vietnamese and Chinese people. The Chinese believe a nursing mother should boil the placenta, make a broth, then drink it to improve her milk.
During the British cooking show "TV Dinner," according to The Independent, a London couple celebrated the birth of their granddaughter by preparing, then eating, the baby's placenta as a means of reflecting rituals around the world and symbolically sharing in the baby's gene pool.
There's the not-so-ceremonial use of placenta, the commercial use of "placenta extract" found in some cosmetics.
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