About 8,000 thalidomide babies were born with physical disabilities. Many DES babies were plagued with a whole host of health problems. But our authors decided not to distinguish between drugs delivered in relatively high doses in readily usable forms and low-levels of manmade chemicals bound up in the environment. Our Stolen Future claims plants defend themselves by sterilizing predators. Actually, the authors raised a good, but one-sided, point about the plants.
Plants produce substances that act like estrogens.
These plant estrogens could theoretically interfere with our own hormonal processes. The authors,of course, make the logical leap that manmade chemicals may also act like estrogens and be problematic. The ratio of plant estrogens to synthetic estrogens is about 40 million to 1. Few and far between. And they haven't even really linked these incidents to manmade chemicals.