>>2192790idk what you mean by "healthier" but ... lemme tell you a little story.
Wanted a 1 week getaway. Picked spot: across a stream from a hunting camp, up an almost vertical cliff.
I get there, sunny blah blah blah. Get my shit to the other bank. Now to climb an idk what degree inclination of what I hoped was going to be a treed-up steep hill. Nah, not my luck, trees were all rotten, found out as I lost my footing and almost fell and reached for a trunk ... it disintegrated.
Anyway ... The reason I lost my footing initially? It was raining and the rocks protruding from the ground were wet and my shoes slipped.
So ... I went barefoot. Had no problems getting all my shit up the cliff, even the 85L backpack full of shit needed for a week (took me 20 minutes for I think 30 feet straight up, picrel.
So yeah .. if you mean "healthier" as in keeping your ass alive by not allowing synthetic-materials to lose traction on very wet and muddy almost-vertical surfaces you're moving on ... then yeah barefoot is "healthier".
Dunno shit about everything else. Evolutionarily we've been barefoot for longer than we've had shoes, so there's at least SOME sort of shock absorption built into our joints, but it's not peak performance equipment for sure.
