Much like a misbehaving popstar or gluten-filled food, high heels have developed a very bad reputation lately. Scientists have produced study after study proving what women already know: Heels hurt your feet. A lot. Specifically, shoes with heels strain your calf muscles, permanently shorten your tendons, damage your posture and twist your ankles. But we've got some consolation for all your heel devotees: High heels do NOT give you bunions!
They might make your preexisting bunions worse, of course. But the newly-released Framingham Foot Study, which examined the connection between foot pain and type of footwear in over 1,000 adults, concluded that bunions and similar foot disorders (hammer toe, claw toe) are "highly inheritable." This means that the main cause of bunions aren't your high heels or those ballet classes you took as a kid, but rather your genes.
To drive the point home, the researchers titled their report of the findings, "Blame Your Parents for Bunion Woes."
"These new findings highlight the importance of furthering our understanding of what causes greater susceptibility to these foot conditions," said Dr. Marian Hannan, who led the study.
That doesn't mean that uncomfortable or poorly-made shoes don't exacerbate foot conditions, as shoes can still rub against bunions and cause pain. But of all the harm heels inflict on women's bodies -- hurting our muscles, throwing our posture out of whack, making us fall off a sidewalk or two -- they aren't to blame for those bunions. Those, like so many other things, you can blame on your mother.
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