Modern society may no longer be using cocaine for toothaches or chloroform for asthma, but we’re not without our fair share of health practices that sound bizarre to the uninitiated. Exhibit A? Grounding — the act of walking barefoot or otherwise touching your bare skin to the Earth (literally, touching grass) — as a way of achieving supposed health benefits.

Those who live online won’t be surprised to see yet another bizarre-sounding health trend emerge. Spend a little time on Health Twitter or really any other community on social media, and you’ll soon find people sleeping with their mouths taped shut, removing all the plasma from their bodies, sunning their buttholes, calling diet advice “oppression,” doing coffee enemas, accusing anyone not wearing a mask years after the peak of COVID-19 as being an ‘air rawdogger’ with a vendetta against their elderly neighbors (sorry Taylor) — all supposedly in the name of “health.”

But another such practice that’s gaining popularity in online circles is indeed touching grass and walking barefoot, not as a way of signaling to university coeds you’re a “free spirit” who will sell them mushrooms, but as a genuine health protocol to be incorporated into one’s daily routine. And though it’s grown to become the subject of memes, make no mistake — grounders are serious about the practice, and it’s gaining popularity in “Lindy” corners of Health Twitter, where this “rvturn”-coded exercise is a natural fit.

As an admitted Health Twitter lurker myself, I fully confess that I bought into the hype on this one. I started grounding about two years ago with morning barefoot walks in Austin’s Zilker Park, and could have sworn it was doing something beneficial for my health when I would come back to my apartment feeling more relaxed. I even bought one of several “grounding products” that opportunistic ecomm companies are now selling, including a pair of shoes that (supposedly?) mimics Earth’s electrical charge via copper plug on the sole so that I could extend my grounding experience throughout the day.

While critics tend to think this all a matter of the placebo effect, I’ve been conflicted on the matter. On one hand, yes, everyone on the internet is stupid and wrong. But on the other? I feel great. So, wanting to learn a little more, I reached out to someone far smarter than myself — the talented novelist Tao Lin, friend of my editor, Brandon, and fellow grounding practitioner — for some further insight (and some much-needed validation).

“Intuitively, I knew that walking barefoot would be healthy. But I’ve done research on it,” Tao explained. “Grounding connects you with Earth, which has a negative charge (or extra electrons), while people, especially unhealthy people, have a positive charge (a lack of electrons).”

If that still sounds too New Age-y for you, take solace in the fact you’re not alone. Grounding has been met with furious criticism for years — this 2014 post from a Union College physics professor on Science Blogs referred to it as “a bunch of crap,” calling into question a number of grounding proponents’ claims.

On Tao’s point about Earth’s electrons, for example, the professor argued: “Electrons are electrons are electrons — there’s nothing that singles out or sets apart an electron from the Earth as opposed to from some synthetic material, or, for that matter, an electron that came blasting in from outer space.”

Meanwhile, others online speculate that much of the chatter about grounding/earthing is simply part of a scam to sell products, like the shoes I mentioned earlier (damn it). To their point, it certainly isn’t a great look when many of these products are exorbitantly priced — $700 for an infrared earthing mat? There’s simply no denying it does all sound a little grift-y (especially with the “grounding products” market expected to grow well into the millions by 2035).

But detractors should know, for as crazy as it sounds, there actually is some well-founded scientific evidence that grounding isn’t just woo-woo nonsense designed to sell you mats.

From 2012-2014, researchers at Penn State University conducted a study on preterm infants in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) to determine whether or not “electrical grounding” had any effect on their health outcomes. The researchers hypothesized that because a lot of equipment in the NICU produces low-frequency electromagnetic fields which can affect the autonomic nervous system, finding a way to counteract those frequencies would be greatly beneficial, since preterm infants can be particularly vulnerable to their effects.

“Preterm babies in the NICU have a lot of health challenges due to the immaturity of their lungs, of their bowel, and of all their organs,” Dr. Charles Palmer explained. “So we decided to look at how electrical grounding could help improve vagal tone and mitigate some of those challenges.”

Vagal tone is a valuable health metric that analyzes heart rate variability between inhalation and exhalation, assessing the function of the vagus nerve (a key component of the autonomic nervous system that regulates the body’s internal organs during rest). Researchers found electrically grounding the babies — literally “connecting an electrode wire from the infants’ incubators or open cribs to the ground” — increased infants’ vagal tones by as much as 67%.

“What we can conclude is that a baby’s autonomic nervous system is able to sense the electrical environment, and it seems as though a baby is more relaxed when grounded,” Palmer said.

There are a number of takeaways we can draw from this study, but first and foremost — it suggests I wasn’t insane for feeling more relaxed when I first started walking barefoot.

What the study also suggests, though, is grounding might be a health practice uniquely suited for our digital age. While researchers sought to counteract the effects of electromagnetic exposure caused by NICU equipment, it isn’t just this equipment that produces electromagnetic fields — so, too, do the laptops, cellphones, and WiFi routers that have become a part of our everyday lives. Perhaps grounding can be an effective way to mitigate and counteract the exposure, however subtle, that we all have to these fields on a daily basis.

Lastly, though, and perhaps most importantly — the study proves Pirate Wires has been looking out for you, dear reader. White Pill fans will recall we concluded every one of those newsletters by telling you all to touch grass, a phrase that is now nearly as iconic in Pirate Wires lore as “Moon should be a state.” It turns out, this wasn’t just an amusing way to end a newsletter — it was our way of offering you free, valuable medical advice. You’re welcome.

Should you pony up $700 on a mat, though? That’s for you to decide. All of this is just to say there’s more nuance to health than most of us have been conditioned to believe. And the next time you stumble across someone online doing weird crap they claim to be beneficial for their health — even as weird as walking around barefoot — don’t be so quick to dismiss them.

They just might be onto something.

—Riley Nork