16 October

Had an interesting conversation with my podiatrist recently, about barefoot shoes. At the time he was recommending Birkenstocks for me, for summer holidays, as he wears himself. I went barefoot one summer and ended up in excruciating pain for about 2 months. His interesting take on the whole barefoot shoe thing? Yes humans evolved to walk barefoot. But like all ‘natural’ health ideas, such as barefoot shoes, it misses most of the nuance. Humans evolved walking on highly variable surfaces, with lots of diverse movement of arches, joints and tissue. But now we walk on almost exclusively artificially flat ground. Your feet aren’t getting the sort of workout on those surfaces they have over millions of years. Arch support shoes give the feet more of that sort of stretch than just walking barefoot on the flat surfaces, which will tend to flatten the arches, both longitudinally and transversally. Arch support footbeds put that variable ground surface that is now missing into the shoe instead. They don’t so much correct bad feet, they help protect feet from the homogeneity of our external environment.