Real Housewives of Cheshire star Tanya Bardsley has followed celebrity mums Kim and Kourtney Kardashian and Coleen Rooney by eating her baby’s placenta.
WAG Tanya and her husband, footballer Phil Bardsley, had their third son Ralphi in August.
And on Monday's episode Tanya had her placenta made into pills in her kitchen by Liverpool mum-of-three Danielle Kinney.
Danielle, who runs her own company Placenta Plus, was the woman who Coleen turned to after the birth of her and Wayne’s third son Kit.
Coleen believed the capsules had helped her to get back into shape, to sleep better and feel energized.
So when yummy mummy Tanya was expecting her fourth baby she was keen to discover the benefits herself and contacted 32-year-old Danielle for help.
Danielle said: “Tanya had suffered with post-natal depression after having her first daughter, Gabriella, then she’d had the two boys, Rocco and Renz, so with Ralphi I think she just wanted to try different things.
“The pills are great for combating post-natal depression because they give back the body’s natural hormones, and obviously Tanya had read that you lose weight with them too. And they help produce collagen which everybody loves."
Tanya got in touch with Danielle two weeks before she was due to go into St Mary’s Hospital in Manchester to ask if she’d create the pills and be happy for it to be filmed.
The makers of ITVBe's Real Housewives of Cheshire had wanted to follow the whole process, but Danielle persuaded them to stop the cameras rolling in the first stages which involve cleaning the placenta, cutting it into fine slices with a sharp knife, then dehydrating it for 15 hours.
She said:“You’re dealing with an human organ and there really can only be me there when I’m doing that, not a full camera crew, because I can’t risk the possibility of cross-contamination.
“So on the day she was going in to be induced Tanya messaged me, then the midwife rang from the hospital and said ‘the baby’s here, you can come and collect it’.
“They put it in a placenta bag and put it on ice, and I was there within the hour. When it comes out it’s at body temperature and that has to be brought down within half an hour, but once it’s on ice it’s actually fine for up to 12 hours. I have a refrigerated box which plugs into my car so I can get it back to the lab in my back garden and start work on it.”
On Monday's episode Daniella takes the dehydrated placenta to be ground down into a powder and encapsulated.
Unlike some women who are squeamish and prefer coloured pills so they can’t see the brown placenta powder, Danielle says the glamorous 35-year-old had a strong stomach for it. “She had no issue about taking the capsules at all,” she reveals.
Placenta pills first hit the headlines last year when Kourtney Kardashian posted a picture of hers saying ‘Yummy … PLACENTA pills! No joke … I will be sad when my placenta pills run out. They are life changing!”
Her sister Kim also took them after having daughter North West and baby Saint, admitting she was a big fan.
But Danielle says it was Coleen Rooney going public about taking them which really spotlighted the trend in the UK.
