If you have plastic food containers, do not put them in the microwave and, in general, try to prevent them from heating up. Some, the majority, are endocrine disruptors. That is to say, despite being petroleum-derived products, they simulate hormonal functioning that alters health in very diverse ways. Also endocrine disruptors are the price labels placed on trays of fresh or cooked supermarket products. Experts advise that we do not touch them and that we quickly avoid their contact with food. The plastic that wraps these trays can also be toxic. And shampoo, sunscreen, or synthetic clothing that repels water. Scientists have identified a thousand toxic elements that can function as endocrine disruptors, and which in some cases penetrate the human body and can stay there for even years. It is not something immediate. There is no clear cause-effect relationship, and other factors contribute to it, but it is becoming clearer, after hundreds of scientific studies, that constant exposure to this cocktail of toxins ends up having consequences. It has been linked, for example, to early puberty, obesity, diabetes, and infertility problems. And there are starting to be indications that link them to some types of hormonal cancer, such as prostate or breast cancer. They are especially dangerous for pregnant women, children, and adolescents.

The alarm clock rings. You go through the shower and smear yourself, at the very least, with about seven cosmetic and personal hygiene products, including creams, soaps, deodorants –if you are a woman, the number rises to nine–, according to data from Cosmetics Europe. You wear a polyester shirt for the first time, nice and cool. You leave the house and grab a coffee to go and a tray of cut fruit. You walk to work along a street with heavy traffic and quite a bit of noise.

For nearly four decades, physician and researcher Nicolás Olea (Granada, 1954) has studied how thousands of chemical compounds present in plastics, cosmetics, or packaging interfere with the hormonal system and may contribute to the development of various diseases. He was one of the pioneer researchers to study the effects of bisphenol A on human health and today he is an international reference in the field of endocrine disruptors. With humor, vehemence, and a contagious passion, Olea, author of 80 recomendaciones para evitar los tóxicos (Integral, 2025), maintains that regulation lags decades behind scientific evidence and offers a series of practical recommendations to reduce daily exposure to these substances, which he considers, for the most part, avoidable.

When we eat a can of tuna, we're ingesting a portion of the yellowfin variety of this oily fish, usually large. The other two ingredients we're ingesting are oil, which can be either olive oil (in rare cases, extra virgin) or sunflower oil, and salt. In fact, the proportions of salt can be high because it's the ingredient used to preserve the tuna in the can. For this reason, Dr. Pere Gascón states that "a can of tuna doesn't replace one of the three recommended weekly servings of fish." The doctor also warns about the origin of the canned fish. "Often they're not locally caught fish, but quite the opposite," he says.