Bad news: Our shoes aren’t getting smaller. Our feet are getting bigger. According to a new report by the National Shoe Retailers Association the average woman’s foot has grown by more than a size over the last three decades.
The human body is constantly evolving, and as nutrition for people in the western world has increased (as has acccess to high-calorie junk food), so have body sizes. At the beginning of the 20th century the average woman wore a size 3.5 or size 4 shoe. This increased to a 5.5 in the forties and remained this way till the 60s. By the 1970s, the average female foot was a 7.5 and now, forty years later, the most common foot size for the American female is somewhere between an 8 ½ and a 9.
“People are getting taller and heavier, as they have for generation after generation,”Podiatric historian William Rossi told the lifestyle blog Divine Caroline. ”And their feet are getting larger in proportion to their bodies...”
Read more at TIME
