“How we sleep, what we breathe, what we eat, what we drink, what we expose ourselves to—all of these things definitely factor into your physical and mental health,” says Dr. Michael Dominello, a radiation oncologist at Karmanos Cancer Institute in Detroit. “By making no decision, you're actually making a decision, oftentimes for the worse.”
Heat causes plastic to release small amounts of chemicals into food—including endocrine disruptors, which interfere with the body’s hormone systems and have been linked to a range of health concerns. That’s why some oncologists have replaced the plastic items in their kitchens.
Dr. Nikki Wood, a pediatric hematologist-oncologist at Children’s Mercy Kansas City, applies the same rule across her whole kitchen. Her household has gone almost entirely glass for food storage, opting for plastic or silicone lids that don’t touch the food. The biggest offenders, in her view, are plastic takeout containers. “When you put something warm in and it touches plastic, you’re leaching microplastics into your food, and you’re ingesting that,” says Wood, who partners with the Childhood Cancer & the Environment Program (CCEP). So when leftovers come home, they go straight into glass—and Wood won’t reheat anything in plastic, period.
They use the back burners on purpose
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Even with a hood that vents properly, Wood has one more habit: She cooks on the back burners whenever she can. The reason is simple physics. The hood’s intake is mounted at the back, so smoke and fumes rising from the back burners get pulled straight up into it. Smoke from the front burners has farther to travel, and a lot of it drifts sideways into the kitchen before the hood can catch it.
His advice on placement: Put the purifier where people spend the most time. “I would do it in the larger areas, which track in the most amount of people and high foot traffic,” Shakeel says.
They’ve banned candles and air fresheners
Many people associate a clean-smelling home with an actually clean one. Wood takes issue with that. “Any time you have a combustible type of material, like a candle wick or the electric fresheners, you’re burning something, and that’s putting a chemical in the air,” she says. “That makes the air quality poor, and those chemicals are associated with health outcomes.” They can trigger asthma flare-ups in children, she notes, and have also been linked to headaches, skin irritation, and hormone disruption. That’s why she’s told her cleaners not to leave the house smelling fresh. “I just don’t want it to smell or look dirty,” she says. “I don’t need it to smell clean.”
Candles aren’t the only culprits. New furniture, fresh paint, and recent renovations can all release chemicals into the air, especially when sunlight warms them up. Those compounds, Wood says, end up binding to household dust—where they sit until someone sweeps, vacuums, or stirs them back into the air.
What comes out of the tap depends on where you live, what your pipes are made of, and what’s been added at the municipal plant. Dominello recommends starting with a test. At-home kits are available online, and some companies will test for free in the hopes of selling you a filtration system. (You can decline the upsell.) “It’s important to understand the quality of the water that you’re using at home,” he says. “You’re showering in this water, you’re drinking this water, you’re using it to cook, you’re using it to wash your fruits and vegetables.”
Wood, meanwhile, doesn’t filter her whole house; she runs her drinking water through a filter and changes it on the manufacturer’s schedule. An expired filter, she notes, can become its own source of contamination.
They take their shoes off at the door
The stakes are highest in households with small children. Toddlers and babies spend their days at floor level, crawling through dust, putting hands and objects in their mouths, and breathing air closer to the ground than anyone else. “Early life exposures can have an even more important effect later in life,” Shakeel says. Children are especially vulnerable because their brains and bodies are still developing, and they absorb more pollutants relative to their body size than adults do.
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The same logic applies to vacuums. Most newer models have HEPA filters that trap fine particles, but those filters need to be cleaned or replaced regularly to actually do their job. “Otherwise you’re just going to start spraying that dust around the house,” Wood says. “You’re not going to truly filter it.”
They refuse routine pest spraying—and ask about “integrated pest management”
IPM is a tiered approach to keeping pests out without leaning on chemicals as the first line of defense. Step one is prevention: decreasing clutter, keeping food containers sealed, caulking cracks in the foundation, fixing torn window screens—anything that keeps bugs from getting in or finding food once they do. Step two, if pests still show up, is traps and baits. Chemicals are a last resort, applied as narrowly as possible and only when nothing else works. The point, Wood says, is that spraying alone doesn’t actually fix the underlying issue: “You’re really not solving the problem, and you’re just exposing those in your home to unnecessary chemicals.”
The habits add up. No single one is going to keep cancer at bay, but reducing daily exposure is certainly possible. “We can't really eliminate every exposure, but we can reduce them,” Shakeel says. “Especially during sensitive periods of development, that's where we have a real opportunity to make a difference."
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