Microorganisms can produce secondary metabolites that contaminate grains and seeds, and this way cause significant economic losses and serious damage to health in populations or entire countries. One of these microorganisms are fungi of the genus Aspergillus, which produce aflatoxins. The ingested of these mycotoxins are related to various types of cancer, mainly liver, in addition to that in children it can cause other ills. Due to their structure, aflatoxins are odorless, colorless, and tasteless, so they cannot be identified with the naked eye, together with these characteristics, these can tolerate various processes of cooking, fermentation and pH change, which makes us question whether can aflatoxins continue in foods ready to eat, be cumulative and represent a type of risk to health in the long term? For this reason, this review describes which are aflatoxins, the absorption and metabolism of AFB₁ inside the human body, the different types of aflatoxicosis they present, the regulations that exist in different countries regarding their consumption, the contamination present in different processed foods, including derivative products of animal origin and nixtamalized, and finally daily intake analyses of these metabolites in countries concerned with the health of their populations.