NOVEMBER 6, 2011
\nBy Daniel Smith \u201913, Contributing Writer<\/p>\n
On any given day you may struggle with time management, negotiating traffic, or making a nice dish of Le Cordon Bleu. Yet according to Daniel Howell, \u201cWalking is the most complicated thing you do on a daily basis.\u201d<\/p>\n
In a talk Thursday sponsored by the Environmental Action Group, the author and associate professor at Liberty University advocated the concept of \u201cliving barefoot.\u201d He made various points about the anatomical reasoning for losing your shoes and debunked several myths about walking barefoot.<\/p>\n
The \u201cBarefoot Professor\u201d showed how shoes adversely alter the structure of your foot.\u00a0 They damage joints and impact your posture. He said the shoe is\u00a0a cast that immobilizes your foot, reduces blood flow and atrophies the muscles. Shoes, he said, change the way we stand, walk and run.<\/p>\n
The author of The Barefoot Book<\/em> also debunked\u00a0numerous myths about walking barefoot. Despite what the general public may think, he said, it is not <\/em>illegal to be barefoot in public, or to drive barefoot.<\/p>\n Living barefoot isn\u2019t against any health codes and, according to the man who has run roughly \u201c3,000 miles and never stepped on glass,\u201d it isn\u2019t dangerous, either.<\/p>\n Still, Howell acknowledged that some people might consider being barefoot unprofessional, unseemly and unfashionable.\u00a0He praised countries like New Zealand where it is commonplace for people to go barefoot\u2014as the professor put it, \u201clike wearing a pair of shorts or blue jeans.\u201d This sort of acceptance is what Howell strives for in his attempt to spread awareness about the benefits of living barefoot, as well as the debilitating costs of wearing shoes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" NOVEMBER 6, 2011 On any given day you may struggle with time management, negotiating traffic, or making a nice dish of Le Cordon Bleu. Yet according to Daniel Howell, \u201cWalking is the most complicated thing you do on a daily basis.\u201d<\/p>\n In a talk Thursday sponsored by the Environmental Action Group, the author and associate professor at Liberty University advocated the concept of \u201cliving barefoot.\u201d He made various points about the anatomical reasoning for losing your shoes and debunked several myths about walking barefoot.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":265,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,17,37,18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-181","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academic-department-page","category-centers-and-institutes","category-earth-environmental-and-sustainability-sciences","category-shi-institute-for-sustainable-communities"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/265"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=181"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=181"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=181"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=181"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nBy Daniel Smith \u201913, Contributing Writer<\/p>\n