MYTHCONCEPTIONS

The myth

The British have awful teeth. That’s when they have any teeth at all. The people of the USA have wonderful teeth, all of them, huge and white and even.

The “truth”

The strangest insult I ever had flung in my direction came years ago, following an on-line political disagreement. Evidently losing patience with rhetoric, my adversary typed: “Why don’t you just buy a frigging toothbrush, English!!!” It was the first time I’d seen triple exclamation marks outside a comic, but more significantly it was the first time I’d encountered one of the USian tribe’s central beliefs: that British teeth are lousy, because their owners disdain to maintain them. Evidentially, rather than culturally, this belief is easily demolished. The largest bit of research to date appears to be that carried out jointly by Harvard and the University of London in 2015, which found that a US citizen has on average 7.31 missing teeth, compared to a UK average of 6.97. Most shockingly, whereas in the UK, as you would expect, older generations have the worst teeth, in the US the group most likely to be entirely toothless is adults of working age. Other studies come to similar conclusions; for instance, the British are much more likely than the Americans to visit a dentist at least once a year. It’s assumed that this disparity is explained by the relatively greater access to dental care for poorer people in the UK than in the US, while well-off Americans are more concerned than their British counterparts with cosmetic dentistry.

Disclaimer

If you have the data to reinstate this myth then please send it to the letters page so we can all enjoy drilling down into it.

Sources

https://bda.org/news-centre/blog/british-teethvs-the-hollywood-smile; www.medicinenet.com/script/main/art. asp?articlekey=192566

Mythchaser

Which other transatlantic Well Known Facts can we puncture? Are USians really more obese than UKers? Do they all visit shrinks? Are the British heavier drinkers? Etcetera?