Barefooters

I'm all for barefooting if that's your lifestyle. It's just, I've had a few questions since I've heard of the practice.
Aren't you worried about parasites? The number one way people get them is through their feet.
I would think hippie-minded barefooters would be more concerned for their health.
Do you ever get infections? Do you ever carry around sandals in case you come across a pee-sprayed public restroom or something like that?

 

that's exactly why I need shoes or sandals.

I can't walk in this city with no shoes or sandals on. Sidewalks here are filthy and covered in glass.
With how dirty store floors are here also, I'd never walk in them barefoot.

About the only places I do go barefoot, is around the house and along the beach.
I to support those who choose to go barefoot, but just can't live without shoes or at the very least, sandals.

 

Parasites are not a problem anymore in most areas. They only occur in places where for many years large populations of people have been dumping their own feces in the soil and where they stand around in their own contaminated soil all day. Just don't go barefoot anywhere like that!

I've been mostly barefoot for almost 20 years, and always hike barefoot, ride my bike barefoot, walk all over town barefoot, and have never gotten an infection or serious injury. Once in a while I get a thorn or something but it's never a big deal. In the summer the sole pads of my feet get tough and I can stand on scorching hot pavement without a problem.

I feel way healthier since I've gone barefoot- I feel stronger, my legs, feet, and back have become stronger, and I actually catch way fewer colds than before when I used to wear shoes as a kid. I think that's because shoes make germs fester and grow in big numbers and then you breath them in when you take your shoes off at home. So going barefoot makes you and your home way heathier overall. It's one of the great lost secrets of our modern time.

As far as the pee-sprayed bathrooms- ewww. Yeah I get grossed out by them too. I usually bring flip-flops with me to big dirty cities, which I mostly avoid anyway. I'm more of a country barefooter myself.

But if I find myself having to use a dirty public bathroom barefoot I tip toe in there and stand really far away from the urinal so I don't step in pee. If I need to use the toilet, I put wads of toilet paper on the floor for my feet to step on. I rarely find myself stepping squarely in pee or gross stuff, but when it happens I'm fully aware of it and quickly find some water somewhere to wash with.

 

Sweet dream is absolutely right, my experiences are similar. While i'm here, i would like to point out that urine is sterile...

 

Not so. In the US, only the hookworm can enter the skin, but it hasn't been a serious problem in the South since modern plumbing has replaced the outhouses and never was a problem in cooler climates. In my own country there aren't any parasites that enter throught the feet at all, even before plumbing. Here's a piece about hookworm: http://www.barefooters.org/best-of/hookworm-ran.txt
There are tropical worms that can enter the skin but most are water-borne, and infect people who are wading or swimming. If you're swimming you'll most likely be barefoot and also they usually attack the thin skin on ankles etc rather than the thick soles of a barefooter!
Other concerns are ticks, but while we have plenty of ticks here, I've also had better luck keeping them from attaching when barefoot and in shorts than when wearing lots of clothing... they like to burrow underneath clothing, ride home in creases of clothing and get onto your skin later on, etc... also they don't transmit enough Lyme to make you sick until 36-48 hrs after attaching so it's more important to do regular checks than anything else... I've flicked them off my bare legs before they even attached themselves while friends who wore long pants found them only in the evening merrily sucking away. The last time I had a tick attached in several years was when I hadn't been outside except for on city streets for a number of days, it must've been carried in by my cats (they had a bit of a problem with ticks at the time and I found a couple more crawling on the furniture before the Frontline kicked in and the tick invasion was stopped).

I've read everything I come across and done a lot of research, as well as having my own experience in eleven years of going barefoot, and I'm totally convinced going barefoot is a very healthy thing to do. I rarely even get any injury, let alone an infected one. I get a tiny splinter maybe once a year, never had a cut, never had a blister. Feet are a lot tougher than you'd think!

As for germs, the dirt on door knobs, shopping carts, railings etc may not be as visible, but there are just as many or more germs on them. And unless we prop our feet up on the table or lick our toes, with our hands we are more likely to transfer germs to our food and face where the germs can enter our body.

Also interestingly enough, I've met many doctors -accompanying my mother, not for me!- and none of them have had a problem with my bare feet either. Even US barefooters report getting far *less* negative comments from their doctors and other health care professionals than from employees and managers at stores...

As for the cold, I used to be sickly all winter, coughing and sneezing from early fall until late spring no matter what I tried, but these past eleven years I've called in sick once (for two days, and not even in winter) and even a minor cough is rare.

Nope, I try to avoid those and if I have to use one, I'd rather trust my skin than put on sandals. As I mentioned above, transferring the germs to a place where they can enter your body is a greater risk than having them sit on the unbroken skin, so people who put on flipflops briefly in a place where they were barefoot (pool, beach) are actually *increasing* the risk of catching something. Think about it; to visit the restroom wearing flipflops but return to being barefoot afterwards, you have to HANDle the footwear to get it and put it on, then you walk through whatever is on the floor and instead of leaving it there on your feet on floor level, you take off the flipflops, *HANDling* them again (if it's a public place where you don't kick them off and leave them on the ground), and quite possibly people will even put them back in a bag where they may be sitting next to your towel, snacks etc... that or they have to pick them up and carry them, again in their HANDS! They think they're being careful but they're in fact *increasing* the risk.

 

Thanks to all of you! That made a lot of sense. I didn't know you really couldn't get parasites through your feet anymore.

 

Ha! I would've chimed in too, but it looks like everyone else beat me to it.

Glad you found that helpful, WanderingSoul. I'm just curious, though--now knowing what you know, are tempted to start going out barefoot yourself?

 

Very well said, Myranya. I just want to add a little more about going barefoot in public restrooms.

I have no problem walking into public restrooms barefoot. I would try to avoid stepping into something that's obviously wet if I can avoid it, but if I can't, so be it. You have a much, much greater chance of catching some infection or disease from touching things with your bare hands than your bare feet. Anything you touch with your hands in a restroom has probably also been touched by many other people who have also touched various parts of their body including their own urine or feces. And the big difference between our hands and our feet is that our feet are highly unlikely to ever touch anything else except the floor or the ground, whereas our hands will be touching lots of other places on our own bodies, including our face, mouth and nose, as well as touching food we may eat later, and other people in various places. We can wash our hands all we want, but still how are you going to avoid touching something else while you're still in that environment? Even if you are as germaphobic as Howard Hughes was, just getting out of the restroom without touching something might be next to impossible. For example, if, after washing your hands, you try to avoid touching the door handle by holding a paper towel or toilet tissue, who's to say that even the paper towel doesn't have some germs on it?

I'll admit, there was a time a few years ago when I resumed going barefoot in public, after many years of mostly flip-flops, that for a while I was reluctant to go into a California freeway rest stop restroom barefoot. In my opinion, the rest stops in California have the filthiest restrooms of any I've ever seen. But research and logic convinced me that other than a "yuck" factor (or in modern day teenage parlance, a "eeww..." factor), for me to believe and declare to others that going barefoot is no less safe than wearing shoes, my reluctance to go into one of those restrooms barefoot was nothing short of hypocrisy.

For a barefooter, the most practical and safest thing in the long run is just to walk in barefoot, not worry about it at all, and just wash our hands to the best of our ability before leaving. In that way our body has the best chance of doing its job of naturally fighting off any potential infections, as it always does continually as we live in this world. Bare feet were made to touch the ground or whatever surface we're walking on. That's their job, their function. The ground, or floor, is not required to be clean and sanitary for our feet to function properly and our bodies to remain healthy.

 

Yeah, same here.

Just think of it though, if you walk into a restroom with shoes on, the "wet stuff" gets on the bottoms of your shoes and you track it with you when you leave. Putting shoes on doesn't really help anything in that sense. Germs and dirt will travel with us no matter what your wearing, especially if we don't wash up. (How many times do people wash their shoes anyway? They don't? "Ooh, gross!")

 

I won't set foot in a dirty restroom, if it really is that dirty. So that's how I avoid those germs!

 

Those germs you plan to avoid also exsist in other places you might not even consider. Where people go, germs go.

It's as simple as that.

 

I was only talking specifically about pee germs. I know there are germs everywhere.

 

Cool, cool. I wouldn't even go into most public restrooms barefoot myself either, and I'm almost a fulltime barefooter!

So aside from restrooms, are you thinking about going barefoot in public yourself (or is that something you do already)?

 

I don't usually go out barefoot. I do like being barefoot at home when it's not too cold.

 

Maybe you should try it out--well, maybe just a walk in the grass or something like that.

 

FYI, Urine is sterile. Strictly speaking, there is no such thing as a 'pee germ'.

 

I love walking in the grass barefoot.
But sorry you guys, I like shoes too much to completely abandon them from my lifestyle.

 

It's still pee, and it's still gross.

 

i wish I could go barefoot more then I do. Most places won't let you in without shoes. I walk around my house and outside barefoot though I just carry my sandals with me if i'm outside. but people look at me crazy because no matter the temp. I'm always in flip flops or sandals.

 

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