How to Clean Your House Like an Oncologist

—Photo-illustration by TIME (Source Images: Africa images via Canva; Wistudio via Canva; NadhifCreative via Canva; mabaff via Canva)You can’t control whether a relative smoked in the house you grew up in, whether the factory near your childhood home leached chemicals into the groundwater, or whether the air outside your apartment has fine particulates floating through it on any given afternoon. But oncologists—the doctors who spend their careers thinking about why people develop cancer—are clear about one thing: There’s a long list of exposures inside your home that you can actually do something about.“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.”We asked four oncologists to describe the changes they’ve made in their own houses to reduce their daily exposure to chemicals, pollutants, and carcinogens. Here are eight of them.They’ve engineered plastic out of their kitchenHeat 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. Andrea Tufano-Sugarman, a gynecologic medical oncologist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, won’t heat anything in plastic. She’s also swapped her cutting boards from plastic to…

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