Phytoestrogens Term Analysis

On the other hand, as much as plants want animals to eat their fruit, they don’t want animals to get much closer than that—when creatures start to nibble on their leaves or gnaw at their roots, things can get tricky. So plants have to be able to defend themselves. Just because they’re generally immobile doesn't mean they’re pushovers.

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.