Author Jean-Marie Kauth interviewed SafetyNEST Founder and CEO Alexandra Destler as part of Kauth’s research for her upcoming book, Poisoning Our Children.
Alexandra Destler, EdM, earned degrees from Harvard, Cornell, and the Sorbonne and serves as an advisor to NIEHS Center on Health and Environment Across the LifeSpan and Mount Sinai Icahn School of Medicine. She remembers being alarmed to learn at Harvard Medical School that the over 85,000+ chemicals that pervade our world are also affecting our children before they are even born, contributing to health effects like birth defects, autism spectrum disorder, asthma, obesity, and cancers in children. Once she became a mother herself, she became very aware of daily decisions and habits that might affect her baby – a daunting decision for anyone, even the highly educated. She founded SafetyNEST, a charismatic, clear, and personalized website designed to promote the environmental health of children, particularly by educating health professionals and parents on prenatal exposures.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity. Read the full interview on Substack here