Science Weekly
Sub-two-hour marathon, spooky houses explained and why is UK health in decline?
30 Apr 2026
Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This is The Guardian. Have you ever been in a dilapidated castle, old manor house or Victorian terrace and thought something feels off? In fact, not just off, but downright spooky. Well now, scientists think they might have figured out why these spaces give us the heebie-jeebies. And spoiler, it's far more mundane than ancient spirits returning to haunt the living.
Still, if that was something you encountered, you'd be forgiven for running a mile in the opposite direction as fast as you could. And this weekend, humans proved once again they can run really far, really fast. Not one, but two runners broke the two-hour barrier at the London Marathon. How did they manage it?
And fitness, or the lack of it, was something the UK had to take stock of this week, as a report found the years we spend in good health are falling.
Chapter 2: What is the decline in healthy life expectancy in the UK?
But why is the UK becoming sicker when so many nations are going the other way? Today I chat to science editor Ian Sample about the stories you need to know. From The Guardian, I'm Madeleine Finlay and this is Science Weekly.
Ian, we're starting today with a report that suggests that healthy life expectancy of a baby born now in England, Scotland or Wales has declined by around two years since 2012. So what exactly does healthy life expectancy mean and how is that measured?
So this is an analysis by a think tank called the Health Foundation. And what they've done is draw on UK data from the Office for National Statistics. And they've also got similar data from other countries. So healthy life expectancy is pretty much what it says on the can. How long am I expected to live without any sort of ongoing health problems?
Chapter 3: How is healthy life expectancy measured and what does it mean?
So how long is my healthy life? Sometimes called health span as well. And the way they get this information is it's essentially self-reported. So people say, yes, I'm in very good health, good, fair, bad, very bad. So you get a sense of what ages are people saying they're in these different categories.
OK, so increasingly people are reporting being in bad or very bad health earlier. But who's most affected? How does this decline affect? look across different groups?
I'll give you the top line figures and then we can break it down a bit. So if you look at the healthy life expectancy over the period 2012 to 2014, that was 62.9 years for men on average, and for women it was 63.7 years. What the support does then is it looks at what those figures are for 2022 to 2024. Okay, And at that point, it was 60.7 years for men. And for women, it was 60.9 years.
So the drop is more in women than men. And the proportion of life that a man spends in good health is down from 79% to 77%. And for women, it's down from 77% to 73%.
Okay, so that's the difference between men and women. But what about location, geographic location? Because I know this can make a real difference.
This decline in healthy life expectancy was seen across the board from the least deprived to the most deprived areas. But the steepest declines were in those most deprived areas. So inequality is worsening. When you look at the UK as a whole, it shows you that healthy life expectancy has fallen below state pension age in 90% of areas.
And in more than one in 10 local areas, healthy life expectancy is now below 55 years. There is a massive health span inequality in the UK and even within England. I mean, if you look at Richmond-upon-Thames in West London, a wealthy part of the country... The average health span for a man there is 69.3 years, and for a woman it's 70.3 years.
But if you go 250 or so miles north, you'll find the average health span for a man in Blackpool is 50.9 years, so much lower. And the average for a woman in Hartlepool, around the same sort of level up north, is 51.2 years. So there is an incredible divide here.
I find some of those stats really shocking and particularly that stat that healthy life expectancy is lower than pension age in 90% of the places that they looked. That's extraordinary. What's going on? I mean, are there any theories as to why this healthy life expectancy in the UK has declined?
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Chapter 4: Who is most affected by the decline in health in the UK?
And that's causing more diabetes, more heart disease, more stroke, more cancer. But there's also high numbers of deaths from alcohol, drugs, suicide. So all of these things are pulled out by the Health Foundation in this report. And they're saying that obviously... all of those things need attention. Interestingly, overall life expectancy has been pretty stable.
And this fall in healthspan isn't driven by COVID.
And you mentioned there that we as a country are unhealthy. How do we compare to other countries? Because presumably, if you can look at other countries, you might get some pointers as to how to deal with some of these things.
One thing the Health Foundation did was they ranked us alongside other countries. And the UK is now ranked 20 out of 21 high-income countries. And that's down from 14th in 2012. Only the US ranks below us. And the top countries are Japan, Iceland, and Luxembourg. Plenty of other countries have risen in the rankings. Australia, Norway, Portugal, Belgium have all gone up.
And most countries actually increased their health span. The UK went down pretty steadily over this time, along with the US, the Netherlands, Canada and Germany.
So what did the authors of this report, the Health Foundation or even other experts think we can do about this?
I was interested that the Department of Health and Social Care themselves said that these figures were a disgrace. that the UK population was getting less healthy. The Health Foundation, the think tank behind this report, want food firms to make products healthier. And we know there are a lot of calls for the companies to do that and a lot of resistance to doing so.
They also urge ministers to introduce a minimum unit pricing for alcohol, as is done in Scotland, and tackle a lot of the drug-related harm in particular. So they want to see this sort of multi-pronged approach. And I think this idea that we live in this such a what they call an obesogenic environment, is core to a lot of this ill health.
Maddy, over the weekend, we witnessed an incredible sporting feat. Not one, but two runners at the London Marathon broke the two-hour barrier. Sebastian Sawe was the first in with a time of 1 hour 59 and 30 seconds. And right on his heels was Yomif Kajelcha, who ran it in 1 hour 59 and 41 seconds. That's incredible that they both managed this feat.
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Chapter 5: What factors are contributing to the UK's declining health?
If you can't afford that and you're concentrating on the training, I'll tell you what Saway was doing. Now, his team revealed that he was running an average of 200 kilometres or more every week. In the six weeks before the marathon, so this is high volume, lower intensity. I'll say lower intensity because I can't imagine it's low intensity.
And according to some studies, this way of training does seem to produce faster race times. Before the race, Sawe ate bread and honey. Now, these are light, simple carbohydrates. it's nice and easy for the body to break down into energy.
And then as the muscle stores of energy run low, which is going to happen when you're running that fast for that long, Salway was then topping this up with carbohydrate drinks and gels. And then you have to talk about the physiological characteristics of these athletes. You've probably heard of VO2 max. So this is basically how much oxygen your body can absorb and use.
It's like a measure of your cardio and aerobic fitness. And so this is going to be super, super high for elite marathon runners. And so ultimately, they can take in a load of oxygen, pump it around the body really efficiently, and then the muscles will use that oxygen really efficiently as well. But also, Ian, just to throw in there, there is an element of luck, right?
You have to have the perfect weather. Perhaps Zoe and Kajalcha were kind of pushing each other on a little bit. And also, there could be just knowing that breaking that record, that two-hour mark, was really in arm's reach. Coming up, can science explain what's really haunting old houses?
Finally, Ian, you've got a story this week that I'm so excited to talk to you about because it might help explain the creepy feeling you sometimes get in old houses. Tell me about this.
These researchers in Canada have been interested for quite a while in why some people believe in the paranormal and supernatural activity. And as part of their work, they've been interested in whether infrasound, which is this sort of sound you can't hear, it's below your hearing level. Whether that might be playing a role. And you can get infrasound from a lot of sources.
You can get it from traffic going by, but you can also get it from things like old pipes and boilers and ventilation systems. So if they're down in the basement of your creepy old manor, then they could be generating this kind of sound.
Okay, so they have this theory about infrasound. What did they actually do?
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