After some of the comments on my last Vibram Five Fingers post, I thought it would be interesting to delve a little deeper into the human foot and the horror of modern shoes.  In the picture above you can see a pair of very healthy feet from a photo of an Iban man taken recently by Birgit Erath deep in the jungles of Borneo.  This man has likely never worn a shoe, and you can see that his foot gets wider than “normal” toward his toes.

In the sad photo above, you can see a horribly unhealthy foot deformed from the old Chinese practice of foot binding.  Obviously, our feet change dramatically based on the shoes we choose to wear, or not.

In this very interesting post you’ll find the two pictures below, taken of a tribal person’s feet in 1905, and a “normal” person’s feet taken in 1905, next to their shoes, or lack of them:

Tribal Feet

"Normal" Feet

You can clearly see that the “tribal feet” are very similar to the feet of the Iban man.  While the “normal feet” are not exactly similar to the “bound feet”, they are disturbingly deformed.  Many elderly people in civilized Western society have such “normal feet”.  Why?  Take a look at this comparison of my Five Finger shoes to three other types:

The Merrell shoes above used to be some of my favorites.  I actually bought two pairs of them for when my first wore out.  However, now that I’ve become accostomed to the natural FF’s, I can hardly stand the Merrell’s.  It’s easy to see how normal shoes crush your toes together in an abnormal way.  Now, take a look at the FF’s compared to women’s dress shoes!

Whoa now!  You can see why women’s feet will tend to be even worse than men’s in old age!  While this is not nearly as bad as the old Chinese shoes pictures below (picked up in a Hong Kong antiques store), it is pretty bad.

So why are we doing this to our feet???  Well, if I wrote much more you wouldn’t be able to read this on a trip to the toilet…  It should be obvious to all of you though, that the average modern day shoe needs to be flushed down the toilet!