Forget Shoes, Going Barefoot is the New Hotness

You walk wrong. In another classic illustration of why being accustomed to something doesn’t make it right, researchers are finding increasing evidence that the health of the human foot is declining, and it’s not because we’re wearing uncomfortable shoes: it’s because we’re wearing shoes, period.

New York Magazine has it:

Last year, researchers at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, published a study titled “Shod Versus Unshod: The Emergence of Forefoot Pathology in Modern Humans?” in the podiatry journal The Foot. The study examined 180 modern humans from three different population groups (Sotho, Zulu, and European), comparing their feet to one another’s, as well as to the feet of 2,000-year-old skeletons. The researchers concluded that, prior to the invention of shoes, people had healthier feet. Among the modern subjects, the Zulu population, which often goes barefoot, had the healthiest feet while the Europeans-i.e., the habitual shoe-wearers-had the unhealthiest.

The problem is, shoes keep us from walking in a natural human gait - in fact, it’s biomechanically impossible. 4 million years of evolution produced a distinctive human gait that has been warped by ‘carelessly designed’ shoes. Even the spawn of a shoe company empire who now owns one himself, Galahad Clark, admits that shoes are bad for you, no matter how comfy. He’s designed a shoe that complements the shape of the human foot as closely as possible, but still says that barefoot is better. Studies have shown that wearing any type of shoes increases knee injuries.

As New York Magazine puts it,

The sole of your foot has over 200,000 nerve endings in it, one of the highest concentrations anywhere in the body. Our feet are designed to act as earthward antennae, helping us balance and transmitting information to us about the ground we’re walking on.

All of this, along with a ‘back to nature’ trend has inspired the ‘barefoot movement’ with followers numbering in the thousands, most of whom have pledged to go without shoes whenever physically possible. These ‘Barefooters’ go au naturel as they go about their daily routine, hike, run, bicycle, some even strolling in the city.

This news about the wrecking of the human foot isn’t likely to start a mainstream revolution, though. We aren’t about to see masses of people walking into gas station bathrooms barefoot a la Britney Spears, or dashing to their executive offices on Wall Street trying to avoid broken glass and the occasional pile of vomit. But, it may inspire people to kick their shoes off more often when at home, even if they’re digging in the dirt out in the garden.

Link [New York Magazine]
Photo credit: Tom Shierlitz