VIDEO DESCRIPTION:
Good morning, and welcome back to Morning Coffee with Doug! ☕ Grab your cup and join me for a topic that completely flipped my understanding of human biology upside down. Today, we’re talking about the placenta. I grew up with a certain image of what the placenta was, an image gathered from movies, TV shows, and high school science. But the reality? It’s far more incredible and complex. I recently learned that almost everything I thought I knew about it was wrong. In this casual chat, I break down the surprising truths I discovered, including:
🤯 The first, mind-blowing fact that started it all: who the placenta actually belongs to.
🛡️ How it acts as the ultimate camouflage, hiding a growing baby in plain sight.
⚔️ The unexpected “battle” that plays out at a cellular level between mother and child.
🩸 The astonishing way a developing baby hijacks a food supply to grow.
⚖️ The delicate balance this organ must maintain, and what happens when things go wrong (and what preeclampsia really is).
💡 The truth about the umbilical cord and what it’s really connected to. It’s the organ we all had, but most of us never knew we had. It’s the reason you exist. And its story is wilder than any fiction.
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
Good morning and welcome back to Morning Coffee with Doug. It’s the morning, beautiful morning. I even have some sunshine coming in through the window. I have my cup of hot instant coffee and I have something I want to talk about. And this topic is even more unusual than the previous topics that I’m grouping under this idea of Morning Coffee with Doug. And these are things that I spent my entire life believing to be true and then I find out no, I was absolutely completely wrong about that. I just seem to be stumbling across a lot of these things lately. And you know, I talked about tsunamis, about the dark side of the moon, things like that. Even Chinese New Year, certain preconceived notions about Chinese New Year that turn out to be completely untrue. And normally I would talk about these things in my podcast, you know, on the Planet Doug behind the scenes channel. I would have these long form podcasts and have like 15 different topics that I talk about and something like the topic today would be stuck in the middle of one of those. But I’m kind of doing an experiment on Planet Doug where I’m taking those small topics and making an entire video dedicated to that topic rather than burying it deep in a 3-hour podcast. So that’s kind of what’s been going on here.
And this morning I found myself thinking about an organ in the human body, an organ that I never knew we had. And once I get into the topic, I’m pretty sure that if I ask people to raise their hands and be honest and say that they didn’t know they had this organ either, I think most people would raise their hand. I mean, when we go to grade school and high school and we take biology classes, we learn about the human body, all the parts that go into the human body, and we think about the organs. And if you ask a high school student or anybody to list the organs, well, we’re going to talk about the heart, the lungs, the liver, the kidneys, the pancreas. Anyway, when we say the organs of the human body, we all kind of know what we’re talking about. And then we start saying heart, lung, liver, things like that. Those are the organs. And there’s always this trick question that people bring up. It’s a modern quiz. People like to say, you know, like, what is the largest organ of the human body? And everybody guesses lungs or liver. But of course the answer is skin. And our skin is also considered an organ. And by weight and volume of course it is the largest organ of the human body. And that’s something that people bring up like a quiz show question, a trick question. And everybody’s always astonished like, “Wow, I didn’t even know skin was considered an organ.” But there’s one more organ that I can add to the list and that’s what I want to talk about this morning. And it’s an organ that I would say most of us didn’t even know we had. And in fact, it’s the most important one. It’s the most powerful one. And in fact, you wouldn’t even exist today without it. And yet, nobody even knows that we had it. And the organ that I’m talking about is the placenta.
I think we all know the word placenta. And most of us think of it in the same way. If somebody says to you placenta, the image that comes up in your mind is of a kind of container that goes around the baby, a balloon or a bag that envelops the baby and protects it, does something to keep it safe. We all have that image and it really ties in with our sense of motherhood, the mother protecting her baby, protecting her children and there is this thing that you know the mother has the placenta that goes around the baby and protects it and keeps it safe and warm inside her body. I think that is the image if any of us think about the placenta at all. I think that’s the image that we have of the placenta. But I’m here to tell you that that is completely wrong. In fact, the placenta is not even part of the mother’s body. The placenta was part of your body. If you were making a list of the organs of your body, heart, liver, lungs, etc., you can add the placenta because the placenta was part of your body, not actually part of the mother’s body. And that’s the first fact I came across that just blew my mind because it was so different from everything that I’ve understood my entire life. Of course, it’s not a topic that I’ve done deep dives into and thought about a lot. It was just this concept, this idea that floated out there. We hear, we see it in movies, TV shows, medical dramas where a woman is giving birth and they might talk about the placenta and then yeah, we all think, oh yeah, we know what that is. The placenta is this lining, this protective bag that goes around the baby. And then we just move on with our lives. But what I found out recently and what I had no idea was true was that the placenta was part of my body. Yeah. And that kind of blew my mind.
So if the placenta was part of my body, part of your body, part of everyone’s body, where did it come from? And that’s one of the most fascinating things about it. So I think we all again have the basic idea that we all start as a single cell, one cell. We have some DNA from our mother, DNA from our father and they combine to create us. And now we have the one cell that is partly our mother, partly our father and now is something completely new. This one single cell. And then the cell divides. It divides into two cells, right? We all know that from high school biology class. Now we have two cells. Each one of those divides as well. Now we have four cells. They divide become eight cells. Each one of those divides becomes 16, 32, 64, 128. And you grow, right? We all know this. But what I didn’t know was that when you are about at the level of 32 cells, somewhere between 32 on to 64, they form a ball like a tiny tiny tennis ball. And then there are cells grouped in the middle of that ball. And then there are cells that are surrounding that ball in the middle. And those cells that are surrounding the ball in the middle, that is the placenta. And you see what I mean? It came from your body. Your cells, the original cell was dividing, dividing, dividing, turning into this ball. And the cells on the outside of that ball became this new organ that we call the placenta. Meanwhile, all of the cells in the center of course in the center of that ball, they are all dividing and growing and differentiating and they become all the other parts of our body. Again, we all know this from high school biology class. So, those cells are turning into our lungs and heart and liver and arms and legs and fingers and toes. Meanwhile, the placenta, this other organ, is going around that and protecting us as we are growing and developing. And you can think of the placenta almost like a cloak, a protective blanket, or even like a second skin because we’re all familiar with our skin. That is considered an organ. And the skin protects everything underneath. It is a barrier between us and the outside world. It is our armor and it is protecting us from head to toe. And you can think of the placenta as almost like a second skin that was going around our entire body and protecting us while we are inside that protective skin, that cloak. And then it’s protecting us as we grow into what we become.
So what exactly does the placenta do? And to understand that you have to take the concept of pregnancy and look at it from a completely new perspective. Because again, I think we all have this mental image of pregnancy and motherhood as the mother protecting her child, her baby. And we’ve all seen the classic image of a pregnant woman sort of holding her belly and looking down at it and then yeah, that concept of motherhood, protecting her child, caring for her child and baby. But when you get down to the cellular level, what’s really happening, it’s more like a war. There is a battle going on between the baby and the mother’s body. And that might seem completely weird, like what? That doesn’t make any sense at all. But it’s really what is going on. And if you think about it, the embryo, the baby is a part of the mother’s DNA, the father’s DNA creating something new. And as far as the mother’s body is concerned, it is an invader. It is not self, right? So it is like a foreign invader into her body, something alien. And the mother’s immune system will sense an invader. Like if you have a virus or a bacteria, some kind of foreign matter gets into her body or anybody’s body, our immune system kicks into high gear, our body goes up to this foreign matter, kind of gives it the smell test, you know, like, no, that that’s not us. This is a foreign invader. It could be harmful to us. So then your body’s immune system summons its army of white blood cells, attacks this foreign invader, just rips it apart and destroys it. And if everything was happening without the placenta, that’s what would happen to the baby. The mother’s immune system would sense it. Oh, this is something foreign. This is a parasite. and the body, the mother’s immune system would attack it and destroy it. And that’s where the placenta comes in because the placenta is like the baby’s secret weapon. And it does all kinds of amazing things. In one way, it works just like Harry Potter’s invisibility cloak. It hides the baby so that the mother’s body doesn’t even know it’s there. which is really kind of an amazing thing. The mother’s body’s immune system comes around, finds the baby wrapped up in the placenta and isn’t even aware of it. It’s like, oh, there’s nothing here. There’s nothing to worry about. So, the placenta is very much like an invisibility cloak. The next amazing thing that the placenta does is it gets nutrients from the mother’s body. At the very beginning as the baby is growing and is quite small, what the placenta does is it produces a kind of hormone and this hormone tricks the mother’s body. So like the placenta is pressed up against the mother’s body inside and it produces this hormone that tricks those cells in the mother’s body into secreting a liquid a kind of a protein. It’s a little bit like milk and then the placenta absorbs this milk and then feeds it to the baby so that it can start growing. So, like right out of the gate, the first thing the placenta realizes is, oh, the baby needs nutrients. It needs food. And then it tricks the mother’s body, the cells, the lining to produce this protein, and then it absorbs it and passes it on to the baby. So, as a baby, you wouldn’t even start growing without that placenta. And then over time, of course, that nutrient, this protein milk, it isn’t sufficient. The baby needs a lot more than that. And then what the placenta does is it sends out tendrils. It grows into the mother’s body, sends out these tendrils searching for food. And what it’s looking for, of course, are blood vessels. So the placenta digs into the mother’s body and looking for blood vessels and then cuts into the blood vessels and then diverts the mother’s blood flow into the placenta and then it goes from there through a protective film to the baby. So it’s basically hijacking the mother’s food source. The mother of course is eating food for her own body and but then this hidden parasite that the mother’s body isn’t even aware of it hijacks the mother’s bloodstream and diverts some of that blood flow into the placenta and to the baby to help it grow. So yeah, when I was reading about this and finding out about it, I thought it was pretty amazing everything that the placenta is doing. And it really is part of a war, kind of a battle between the baby and the mother’s body. And the placenta is the baby’s secret weapon.
And a final amazing thing about what’s going on here is that the placenta is maintaining a delicate balance because both the baby and the mother are at risk. If the placenta takes too much nutrients from the mother, of course, the mother will weaken and die. But if the placenta doesn’t take enough, the baby doesn’t have enough nutrients to grow. So, it’s like there’s a war going on over resources. And the placenta, using its invisibility cloak, is keeping the baby hidden. But what the placenta wants to do is have no winner in this war. The war has to be a stalemate. If either side wins, it’s bad news for both of them. So, it’s like a battle, but there’s a balance there. Kind of a symbiosis, a symmetry where the placenta is drawing just enough nutrients for the baby to develop and be healthy and the mother also remains healthy. I believe at like later stages of pregnancy again just thinking back to what I read I think something like 25% of the mother’s blood flow is being diverted into the placenta and that feels like a lot and it is and it really doesn’t want to go above that level. So what happens is if you divert too much blood the mother’s blood pressure spikes and that can be life-threatening for the mother and I didn’t know this. This is what is preeclampsia. I’ve heard of preeclampsia my whole life. I knew it was a risk for women in pregnancy but I had no idea what it was. But preeclampsia is the result of a spike in blood pressure because the placenta is drawing too much blood from the mother’s body and of course that can be a very bad thing. So the placenta as I said is keeping a very delicate balancing act between how much blood it is pulling away from the mother’s body how much nutrient it’s taking away from the mother for the baby to grow but it has to keep a perfect balance not take too much not take too little and that is the incredible ability you know the power of this organ that as I said, I never even knew that I had and I had no idea that we all in our life had this organ at one point. And then of course, it does its job as we’re growing. And then once we’re born, it isn’t necessary anymore, but it was always part of our body, which I find really fascinating. And connected to that, of course, is the umbilical cord. And my entire life, I’ve heard about the umbilical cord. It’s been in every movie and TV show in history that involves childbirth. And I always thought I knew what the umbilical cord was. I always thought of it as this pipeline going from the mother’s body to the baby. And that’s how the mother fed the baby through this pipeline, connecting the two of them together. But it turns out I was completely wrong about that as well. The umbilical cord runs between the placenta and the rest of the baby. So you can think of the placenta as part of the baby. It’s another organ that just happens to be outside of the skin and it’s connected to the rest of us through the umbilical cord. So the placenta is drawing all the nutrients from the mother’s body and then it flows to the rest of the baby through the umbilical cord. So again, yeah, I completely misunderstood what the umbilical cord was as well.
So that’s what I found myself thinking about this morning. And in fact, this idea first popped into my head a long long time ago through a podcast. It was a podcast on Radio Lab, which is my favorite podcast. And I remember listening to this, it was released when I heard it on August 20th, 2021. So, if you go back, if you go to the Radio Lab podcast, and do a search for placenta, and the title of the podcast episode is Everybody’s Got One. So, you can just type that into Google, Everybody’s Got One, Radio Lab, and you will find a podcast talking about all of these things that I’ve been rambling about. And of course, the podcast from Radio Lab is going to explain it in a much more interesting way than I just did. I’m just going off of thoughts off the top of my head that I remember about this topic. But given that, I hope you enjoyed that topic. Maybe I taught you something that you didn’t know. You can spare a minute to think about the placenta, this organ that was part of your body and you never even knew about it. It is the most important organ we ever had. We wouldn’t even exist without it. And yet, most of us don’t give it its credit. We didn’t even know what it did for us. So yeah, I like to tip my hat to this organ, the placenta that until quite recently, yeah, I never even knew that I had.