How Shoes Can Change Your Life - And Your Skeleton

A cross-section of a foot inside a shoe. Taken by Mattes, and downloaded from the Wikimedia Commons 26/03/2010.

You might think that shoes can only change your life if you are a sex-and-the-city type shoe lover, spending huge amounts of money on designer footwear. And for most of us, that kind of dedication to shoes is fairly incomprehensible - after all, they're just things to wear to keep your feet safe from broken glass and tarmac, right? Wrong....

In fact, footwear doesn't just change your life in the way that owning that perfect pair of Jimmy Choos can affect a girl. Instead, it can influence the way you walk, the shape of your foot, and even the number and type of pathologies present in your foot bones. A recent study by Zipfel and Berger (2007), for example, has found that some 70% of European males and 66% - that's two in every three! - females has some pathological condition in their big toe, compared to only about 35% of individuals from an archaeological population which habitually walked barefoot.

The study found similar results for all other bones (Zipfer and Berger 2007), suggesting that the habitually unshod foot is healthier than the habitually shod foot in almost all ways. In addition, to ensure that the difference was not due to population differences, they included two other modern (shoe-wearing) populations, Zulu and Sotho, and found similar patterns for all three. The only major anomaly, in fact, was that while all populations (including the unshod one) showed higher proportions of damage to the end of the bones closer to the toes, the Zulu males showed a high proportion of damage to the bone shaft (Zipfer and Berger 2007). The authors concluded that this was because the Zulu population came from a mining town, where males were likely to injure themselves at work.

Perhaps most telling, though, was the fact that high levels of bone deformation or pathological changes that obscured measurement could cause an individual to be excluded from the sample. This is normal in osteological studies: you have to be certain that the measurement you are taking is the same for each individual you study. Interestingly, Zipfer and Berger throw in the fact that while a number of individuals from the three habitually shod populations fell into this category - that is, their foot bones were so damaged they could not be measured - this was true for none of the archaeological, unshod population.

So next time you buy a pair of shoes, take a moment to think if they are really comfortable and properly fitted - it may save you considerable pain later.



References

ZIPFEL, B., & BERGER, L. (2007). Shod versus unshod: The emergence of forefoot pathology in modern humans? The Foot, 17 (4), 205-213 DOI: 10.1016/j.foot.2007.06.002