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Phytoestrogens and reproductive capability

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I'm reading this book about genetic mutations, and this came up. It's nothing new, but it prompted me to want to discover how destructive herbs could be for reproductive ability. It didn't seem like it was difficult for the sheep to hit the disruptive limit.

Survival of the Sickest: The Surprising Connections Between Disease and Longevity:
Quote:Clover, sweet potato, and soy all belong to a group of plants that contain a class of chemicals called phytoestrogens. Sounds familiar, right? It should. Phytoestrogens mimic the effect of animal sex hormones such as estrogen. When animals eat too much of a plant that contains phytoestrogens, the overload of estrogenlike compounds wreaks havoc on their reproductive capability.

There was a sheep-breeding crisis in Western Australia during the 1940s. Otherwise healthy sheep weren’t getting pregnant or were losing their young before giving birth. Everyone was stumped until some bright agricultural specialists discovered the little culprit— European clover. This type of clover produces a potent phytoestrogen called formononetin as a natural defense against grazing predators. And, yes, if you’re a plant, a sheep is a predator! Accustomed to the humidity of Europe, the imported clover plants were struggling to cope with the drier Australian climate. When clover has a bad year— not enough rain or sunshine, or too much rain or sunshine— it protects itself by limiting the size of the next generation of predators. It increases production of formononetin and prevents the birth of baby grazers by sterilizing their would-be parents.

The next time you’re looking for some convenient birth control, you don’t have to snack on a field of clover, of course. But if you take many forms of the famous “Pill,” you’re not doing something all that different. The gifted chemist Carl Djerassi based his development of the Pill on just this kind of botanical birth control. He wasn’t using clover, though; he was using sweet potatoes— the Mexican yam to be exact. He started with disogenin, a phytoestrogen produced by the yam, and from that base, he synthesized the first marketable contraceptive pill in 1951.

Yams aren’t the only source of phytoestrogens in the human diet. Soy is rich in a phytoestrogen called genistein. It’s worth noting that today many processed foods, including commercial baby formulas, use soy because it’s an inexpensive source of nutrition. There’s a growing concern among a small number of scientists that we don’t have a handle on the potential long-term effects of what seems to be an ever-greater level of phytoestrogens and soy in our diet.

It freaked me out a tiny (huge) bit. It makes me wonder if progesterone has a similar effect in large doses as well.
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