It’s not as gross as it sounds, but then, it couldn’t possibly be, right? As a first-time pregnant lady living in crunchy Santa Monica, Calif., next to a raw food restaurant and a seemingly oxymoronic homeopathic pharmacy, hiring a so-called celebrity placenta processor seemed to make sense. Even the hospital birth class had suggested the practice of eating one’s own placenta as a natural way to ward off postpartum depression. It’s normal. It’s natural. Even January Jones is doing it.

Additional potential benefits of a placenta pill included the ability to improve breast milk supply, increase energy and even prevent aging. Talk about a miracle pill! Who wouldn’t sign up for placentophagia, the scientific word (usually referring to animals) for the practice of eating one’s own placenta?

Me — or at least, the prepregnant me. I’ve spent my career helping young women to avoid scams and misperceptions that prey on their body insecurities, and I pride myself on thorough research and general common sense. The old Nancy would have pulled the placenta pills out of a friend’s hand screaming, “You don’t know what’s actually in that! Natural doesn’t always mean good.”

But impending motherhood had shaken me. Delivery room horror stories and tales of baby blues caused my husband and me to spend months educating ourselves to best navigate the worst possible outcomes. So we were blindsided by the one scenario that seemed least likely: an awesome labor and delivery. Still, I was so freaked out about the possibility of awful things happening to me that I started taking the placenta pills as a sort of insurance policy.

After our son’s birth, I was meticulous about what went into my body. I declined all pain medication stronger than ibuprofen, and I even stopped using deodorant, fearing the rumors were true that aluminum might seep into my breast milk. I was a cheerful and healthy new mother. So why did I gobble placenta ground with what the processor mysteriously referred to as “cleansing herbs”? Somehow, it seemed like a good idea at the time.

But 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. 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.

My husband isn’t a doctor (though he is the son of doctors and has played one on screen), but he was right. After I went cold turkey on the placenta pills, I immediately felt better —exorcised even, of an entity that had willingly left my body but that I had stupidly, and with no medical supervision, scarfed back up.

Motherhood returned to being marvelous, save sleep deprivation. At my six-week checkup, I told my wonderful obstetrician that she should have never let me take my placenta home (medical consent is necessary at most hospitals, and she had somewhat grudgingly plopped my placenta in a to-go plastic bag as soon as I delivered it). While the Internet is teeming with individual pro-placenta stories, they are as anecdotal, and in my case as absurdly off beam, as alien sightings. Eight months later my son and I are fine, but I’m kicking myself for being so gullible without a single shred of proof.

Perhaps one day there will be clinical studies on human placentophagia, and we’ll find out more about the pros and cons of the practice. Possibly we’ll eventually be able to obtain a prescription for placenta processing, to make sure we know what’s really in those “cleansing herbs.” These are all concerns I have with the unregulated process in hindsight, which of course is always 20/20. And I wonder: how many other women are putting their trust in their placenta as a minimizer of baby blues when it very well may be a cause of their mama drama?

Maybe it was sheer coincidence that I went nuts right after I started taking my placental pills and returned to normal almost immediately after stopping. If I had continued, I might not have all this new gray hair, and I might have lost this stubborn baby weight faster. Who knows? I do know that I regret eating my placenta — if only because I am disappointed in myself for letting fear and insecurity cause me to make a potentially dangerous decision without doing due diligence on its safety.

Part of the reason I wanted to eat my placenta in the first place is that I am fascinated by the human body and all that it can do. The placenta is an incredible organ that deserves celebration. But — as with the appendix and other organs that the body tends to deem unnecessary — once it comes out, maybe it should stay out.