Simar Bajaj

Yesterday was my first day at the @NYTimes!

Honored to be reporting about health and wellness for a year — and let me know if you have any ideas and tips

I also reckon there's never been a better time for you to sign up for the Well newsletter!

The sewer knows what you ate!

For New York Times, I wrote about the scientists sifting through urine and poop to sequence food DNA, finding traces of chocolate, lettuce, turkey, blueberries, black pepper, and hundreds of other foods — for less than a penny a person. (1/n)

Every week, the New York Times publishes one piece of ideas-driven journalism, explaining a complex problem or illuminating an important way of thinking. Last week, they chose my story on the return of blaming and shaming in public health for the "Ideas" section.

For decades, public health has been moving away from stigma — across HIV/AIDS, mental illness, addiction, obesity, and beyond. But health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has revived a language of personal responsibility, and I wrote about what that reflects and what it costs.

What makes stigma so interesting is that it masquerades as accountability while often making care harder to seek and change harder to sustain. But the usual anti-stigma response has its own problems: Too often, it tries to fix stigma by changing hearts and minds one training at a time, rather than changing the structures that give stigma force.

Of course, personal responsibility matters. People are agentic. But when it comes to public health, a better message may be “constructive responsibility," acknowledging that individuals have responsibilities but insisting that industries, policies, and environments must also be held accountable.

That is what makes Mr. Kennedy’s rhetoric so revealing. He is pointing to something real when he attacks the food industry and other commercial drivers of the chronic disease epidemic. But this critique loses force when he condemns the system and then casts the people shaped by that system as irresponsible.

A better public health would meet this tension honestly: not by pretending people have no agency and not by shaming them for failing to overcome rigged conditions — but by changing those conditions so that agency has a fair chance.

Full story in the replies

Half of patients with Stage IV lung cancer don't receive any life-extending treatments. For @nytimes , I explored this sobering statistic and why so many people with the nation's deadliest cancer go without care.

According to a new @JAMAOnc study of 250,000+ Medicare patients,
❌ 1/3 of patients never see an oncologist.
❌ Rural, unmarried, and minority populations were the least likely to be treated.
❌ 40% die within 3 months of diagnosis, suggesting that many patients are diagnosed far too late. (Think low rates of lung cancer screening and longstanding delays between a suspicious scan and a diagnosis.)

Why does this matter? We are in a "golden age" of lung cancer treatment. Immunotherapy and targeted therapies are incredibly effective and well-tolerated. In fact, with a daily pill, some patients can live for years after being diagnosed. Lung cancer is no longer a death sentence, but access issues, fatalism, and stigma are keeping these promising medications out of reach.

In medicine, there's always been this gap between scientific breakthroughs and the patient bedside. And I believe that improving access and uptake of health care is one of the most challenging and important issues of our time.

@kyleconcannonMD @DrewMoghanaki @muschollings

Read the full story here: nytimes.com/2026/05/07/wel…

I took over The Morning! To tell you to talk to your parents.

It's the flagship newsletter of @nytimes with over 17 million subscribers. And on Super Bowl Sunday, I hosted the newsletter, writing a column about what conversations you need to have with your parents — before an emergency.

Let's be honest: we all put these conversations off — parents and adult children alike. Perhaps it's because we assume they're not yet relevant, are worried how our loved ones will react, or want family gatherings to stay light. But the cost of silence can be conflict, delayed treatment and guilt for years afterward. “It feels like you’re putting them through something hard, but it’s avoiding something that is far, far worse,” @LouiseAronson told me.

How can you start these tough conversations, and what should you talk about? I offer a step-by-step guide below. Would love to know what you think!

Thanks also to @NSmohta and @SabrinaTaldone for their incredible insights for this story!

The full article in @nytimes Well section: nytimes.com/2026/02/08/wel…

My column in The Morning: nytimes.com/2026/02/08/bri…