This is the Guardian. The UK is currently slipping into a cost of living crisis.

It is really quite bad in the 12 months to April inflation rose by 9%.

We're not alone in weathering this storm.

COVID and Russia's war in Ukraine have caused the prices of energy and food to skyrocket around the world.

It will inevitably impact our health in both serious and subtle ways.

We're seeing more and more issues around domestic violence in families.

We're hearing about people's houses getting robbed for the food in their cupboards.

For Alex it's a case of life and death obviously because he's on his oxygen machine overnight.

It's the worrying anxiety of just being able to look after the cells and the family and the feelings of hopelessness.

A recent poll found that 55% of people surveyed in the UK

reported that their health had already worsened because of increased living costs.

So how does financial hardship affect our health and when an extra million people could

be pushed below the poverty line in the UK alone?

Are we facing a health emergency?

From The Guardian, I'm Madeline Finley,

and this is Science Weekly.

Michael Marmot, you're a professor of epidemiology and a director of the Institute of Health Equity at University College London and you recently wrote a piece for the Guardian about how the cost of living crisis was going to hit

the nation's health and there's lots of different ways this is going to happen but I

think that two of the key things right now on people's mind are the cost of food and the cost of energy.

So starting with the former, how do poverty, food and health actually interact?

What we see is quite different from what we see in a very low income country.

poorer people in the UK are more likely to be obese. It's not like of calories, it's

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