The Bad-Mouthing of British Teeth

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June Thomas is an author, podcaster, longtime colleague at Sleep, and a friend.

She's interested in many things.

She wrote a wonderful book about lesbian spaces.

She's great to talk to about television.

But anyone who knows her her knows that there is one subject she loves to chat about more than anything else.

I am obsessed with teeth and I can't really deny it.

Like after the apocalypse when like we're all just doing things that somebody's got to do this, right?

I will try and maybe do a bit of dentistry because I find it absolutely fascinating.

It's a fascination born out of a lifetime of dental work.

June was raised in a small mining village near Manchester, England, by parents who both had dentures.

It's in no way any kind of neglect.

It's just that my parents, you know, they just never had me brush my teeth because they'd never brushed their teeth.

So my teeth were just bad.

When I was young, I had terrible toothache, like just constantly, like I was, I looked like a wee, one of those animals, like chip and dale.

A chipmunk.

A chipmunk.

I looked like a chipmunk.

I often was like totally, you know, puffed out with infections.

I had a lot, just open decay.

Like, honestly, it was a very ugly situation.

In the mid-1980s, when June was in her 20s, she moved to the United States.

As an adult with a good-paying job and dental insurance, she began to invest in fixing her mouth.

Over nearly 40 years in America, she spent something like $100,000 on dental treatment.

It got a whole lot better, but it like, it's never going to be normal.

You know, they're not white.

They're getting all snaggled up, all tangled up.

It was kind of a little bit too late.

Nobody in America ever commented on the state of her teeth directly, which I think is because June's teeth look perfectly lovely.

But she started to suspect it was because Americans didn't find her teeth out of the ordinary.

You know, not for a British person.

It's shocking to me that there's this idea that all Britons have bad teeth.

And conversely, I suppose, by extension, all Americans have great teeth.

Don't let American dogs suffer from British teeth.

Give them greenies treats.

Why don't you get your teeth fixed?

I live in Britain.

I don't want to stand out.

Well, British people have notoriously bad teeth, so.

You can just say British teeth, and that's the joke.

Like, that's it.

That's the joke in a memorable Simpsons episode from 1993, when a dentist tries to scare Ralph Wiggum into proper tooth care.

Let's look at a picture book, the big book of British Smiles.

And he flips through through the pages and it's full of horrific drawings of completely snarled up mouths.

That's enough!

That's enough!

And then there's the most notorious example of all

name, Austin Danger Powers.

Sex?

Yes, please.

In the Austin Powers movies, Mike Myers plays a British spy from the swinging 60s who's unfrozen 30 years later, only to have everyone fixate on his crooked, off-white teeth.

Okay, let me guess.

The floss is garot wire, the toothpaste is plastic explosives, and the toothbrush is the detonation device.

No, actually.

Well, since you've been frozen, there have been fabulous advances in the field of dentistry.

What do you mean?

It wasn't just a one-minute joke.

Like, it was the entire premise of Austin Poe's personality.

Like, do you think it's fair to say Americans just actually all believe that British people have horrible teeth?

I don't doubt for a minute that they believe that.

This is not a fringe opinion.

And the longer June lived here, the more she found herself holding that opinion as well.

I know I too have been incepted by this because when I think, if I just say the words British smile,

I'm seeing those images.

Like you had come around to like you, you basically thought like British teeth were a situation.

Yeah.

But then in 2022, June moved back to the UK.

After decades of internalizing and accepting the American stereotype about British teeth, she was now looking upon real British teeth again.

And she saw something unexpected.

So when I came back, I was looking around, I was looking in people's mouths, I was looking at teeth like I always do, and I thought, they're fine.

And actually, many of them are great.

So, like, what happened?

What happened, America?

Why are you so obsessed with knocking British teeth?

This is Decoder Ring.

I'm Willip Haskin and I'm June Thomas.

Look, I get it.

Brits are smart and funny.

We go around telling jokes in Latin and quoting Shakespeare.

So sure, America, poke fun.

But why are teeth?

Why are Americans so sure that British teeth are uniquely terrible?

Worse than Greek teeth, Egyptian teeth, Australian teeth and every other nation's teeth.

My fear is that I'm to blame for the trope, that it's nightmare mouths like mine that skew the image.

I owe it to my compatriots to prove that I'm the exception, not the rule.

I want to determine once and for all if the American stereotype of bad British teeth has any merit whatsoever.

So, today on decodering.

Why do Americans badmouth British teeth?

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So, I had a mystery to sink sink my teeth into.

Where does the stereotype of mankey snaggled British teeth come from?

And is there any truth to it?

When I drilled down into the history, what I found is that if you go back far enough, you reach a moment when British teeth could not possibly have stood out, because teeth were awful everywhere.

All across Europe, basic dental hygiene was abysmal.

In the 1600s, people were using bone and animal bristle toothbrushes that effectively coated teeth in bacteria.

When you inevitably got a rotten, painful toothache, the only recourse was to have it out.

But you couldn't go to the dentist because the dentist, as we know it, didn't exist.

Instead, there were tooth pullers, dreaded fang yankers with no medical training or access to painkillers, who plied their trade in barbershops and sometimes even tooth-pulling contests.

We see who is the victor now.

Ready?

Ready?

There's a song from the musical Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street, that takes place at one such contest.

To pull the toad

without the skill can damage the root,

now hold the stick.

Events like that were pretty common.

Traveling tooth-pullers liked to draw a crowd by making a show of their extraction skills and not coincidentally, surrounding themselves with musical performers and lots of commotion to muffle the screams of their patients.

For centuries, losing your teeth was considered a natural part of aging, and the few you managed to hold on to would be in gnarly shape.

So, yes, this was the state of things in England, but also in France and Italy and Estonia and all over Europe.

But it's not the French or the Italians or the Estonians who get ribbed about their choppers.

It's not Europeans writ large whose teeth were being described by doctors and anthropologists in the 1930s as notoriously defective, the worst in the world.

Why have the English, in particular, spent centuries taking lumps about our grotty teeth?

I found a clue in the earliest reference to bad English teeth teeth that I came across.

It was made in 1598 by a German visitor to the court of Queen Elizabeth I.

Here's how he described Her Majesty.

Her lips are narrow and her teeth black, a defect that the English seem subject to from their great use of sugar.

In other words, the root of our alleged tooth problems is our sweet tooth.

More than 400 years ago, English people were already notorious for consuming unusually large quantities of sugar.

I mean it starts incredibly early.

There are constant references to the British love of sugar.

Mimi Goodall is a historian who has studied England's appetite for the sweet stuff.

John Evelyn, a diarist, says, because of the peculiar nature of the British people who can't even eat salad dressing or a Rhenish wine without sugar in it.

So it does seem to be something that's tied to British identity.

Most humans are drawn to sweetness, but experts have floated lots of theories about why the English became particularly fond of it.

Some have blamed the climate.

The best way for Britons to keep produce after the short growing season was to candy it or preserve it as jam.

But in the centuries before marmalade, Britons' preferred sweetener was honey, which they loved to put into their beer and wine.

At least until Queen Elizabeth's father came along.

During the Reformation, when Henry VIII divorces Catherine of Aragon and sets up his own church and he dissolves all the monasteries so that Catholics are sort of pushed out of Britain, monasteries were really, really important beekeepers.

And when there's no bees, there's no honey, and therefore the price of honey shoots up.

And just as the price of honey was skyrocketing, a cheaper alternative was becoming more widely available in England than ever before, Thanks to the growing British Empire.

Britain goes over to these islands, Jamaica, Barbados, it colonises them, it takes them over, and then it starts to grow sugar using the labor of enslaved Africans.

Portuguese, Dutch and French merchants had previously developed sugar plantations and processing techniques, but the English were particularly predatory in their approach to the trade.

They do it at scale, they do it with huge volumes.

So they are trafficking more Africans and they are much more invested in colonising other islands.

They're shipping back much, much greater volumes of sugar back to Britain.

And then when it's in Britain, it remains an expensive good, but it is something that everyone is consuming.

Even very, very poor people can still consume small volumes of it.

Handwritten recipe books from this time are full of foods with an unexpected helping of sugar.

Things what I would think sounds interesting, but kind of quite disgusting with sugar and herbs and spices in a kind of eggy blob, that sort of thing, which is called a tansy.

They would have it in wine, they would have it in lots of different medicines as well.

You could have it in those sort of little solid sugar figurines, they were called subtleties.

So, basically, just sucking on sugar.

Sucking on sugar, yes, and I think it, but it would, it was also in cakes, tarts.

By 1797, there's a figure that kind of ordinary people, 11% of their income was going on tea and sugar.

So, because of its connection to colonialism and the slave trade, sugar, an imported good, had become a huge part of the English diet.

Making it even more central still was a seismic cultural change originating in England itself, the Industrial Revolution.

Beginning in the 1750s, people shifted from cultivating the land, toiling according to the sun and the demands of the season, to working in factories on someone else's schedule.

You're clocking in and you're clocking off in a much, much more formalised system.

That means that break time and lunchtime are regulated and how to get cheap and easy energy.

Jam is incredibly important because bread is obviously easily transportable, but you want something to make bread taste nice.

Poor children ate bread and jam, which back then was mostly sugar, for two meals out of three, as did a lot of adults, especially women.

By 1900, sugar made up about one-sixth of English people's caloric intake, more for the poor.

By this time, other countries' sugar consumption had caught up, but English stereotypes were already entrenched.

We're a nation of tea drinkers.

We like our sweets.

And allegedly, as a result, we have terrible teeth.

There is historical validity to the idea that they eat lots of sugar, absolutely.

Whether that leads to tooth decay,

I feel uncomfortable saying yes because

I think there are lots of reasons why dental hygiene is bad beyond sugar.

I'm sort of, I think I've I think I've got a very sort of knee-jerk gut reaction of like, hang a moment.

Hang on a moment indeed.

Even if Elizabeth I really did rot her teeth with treacle tarts more than 400 years ago, what does that matter today?

Dentistry and diet have changed dramatically since the age of empire and the Industrial Revolution.

And it seems to me that the English are still being saddled with a stereotype that has grown pretty long in the tooth.

Okay, I get it.

I have bad teeth.

I wanted to know if there was evidence to back me up.

I think it's a cliche that British mouths are ugly, unattractive, whereas Americans have got perfect teeth.

So what we wanted to do was test that out with data.

Richard Watt is a professor of dental public health at University College in London.

In 2015, he and a group of scientists decided it was time to conduct a study putting the stereotype to the test.

I was was quite keen to sort of dispel that, if that was true, because it's a bit irritating Americans always thinking their teeth are brilliant.

And so they got to work, analysing and comparing information gathered from more than 20,000 adults across two national data sets from the US and England.

They looked at a range of measures, but paid particular attention to missing teeth.

Because the number of missing teeth is important in terms of function, in terms of biting, chewing, nutrition, but also is a really strong indicator of social exclusion, of disadvantage.

So is the stereotype true?

Based on your findings, do Brits have worse teeth?

What we found, to our surprise to be honest, was that American teeth were not better than British teeth.

There you have it, straight from the horse's mouth.

In England there were significantly fewer missing teeth than in the US.

So that is a suggestion that people's oral health is better in England at a population level than in the US.

While the UK data was just from England, it very likely holds true for Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish mouths as well.

Richard and his colleagues published their findings in the British Medical Journal under the title Austin Powers Bites Back.

Yeah, baby!

And that was my idea, by the way.

Well done.

Thank you.

Richard admits that he was moved by the study's findings.

Well, I think I felt a bit of pride, actually, because I thought, well, actually, bugger the Americans, we're not so bad after all.

We've got real problems, but our system is still better than the current US system for oral health.

When Americans learned about this study after it was published in 2015, filled with humility, they took a good long look at their own teeth.

Just kidding, they reacted exactly how you'd expect.

British dental hygiene has, you know, I don't want to offend anybody here, but it's really been considered inferior to dental hygiene in America.

Very often,

the coverage of the paper pointed out the same thing.

The study did not take orthodontics or aesthetic dentistry into account.

It's true.

The study was based on factors like whether teeth were missing, not whether they looked straight or white, which some angry visitors to the British Medical Journal website picked up on.

I read one of their comments to Richard.

Your quote-unquote study is rubbish from my perspective and is just a bunch of yap yap aimed at hiding from the reality that generally speaking, British people have very dark yellow stained teeth.

I honestly don't see how this can even be compared with Americans' teeth situation.

I mean that is there's there's so much passion there.

What do you make of that?

Well what I would say is is dentistry about

beautification and appearance or is dentistry about health and well-being and there's a real danger if it's that sort of a commodification of the mouth as being about beauty to me is that's a big big worry.

A perfect appearance is not the same as good dental health, which is, Richard says, what really matters.

People that have dental diseases can suffer incredible pain.

People with bad oral health can have problems with schooling, poor educational performance.

So, you know, your mouth is not just about a smile.

But Americans seem to think that it is.

Where did they get that idea?

Maybe it's not the peculiarities of British teeth that need to be explained after all.

Maybe it's time for the magnificent American mouth to undergo an examination.

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So, English people do have healthy teeth.

But that's not good enough for Americans.

Because, it turns out, Americans are peculiar about teeth in their own way.

They have come to believe that the only good teeth are cosmetically perfect teeth.

The Americans

want to look very aesthetic, whereas the Brits are maybe not as keen.

I went to a trade show in Glasgow and asked some dental professionals about their take on American teeth.

There does seem to be this tendency to want nice, bright, shiny, pearly whites.

Everything's perfect and white and clean.

They look very like fake.

They look very white and whereas here I've always had patients tell me, oh don't make my dentures too white.

They actually call it horse teeth.

How did Americans come to prize horse teeth?

Teeth as shiny, white, straight and large as piano keys.

After all, American teeth were once as bad as English ones.

Need I remind you that most colonial Americans were also English and also ate a lot of sugar.

Indeed, one of the British laws that provoked the Americans to revolt was a tax on sugar.

And Americans' dental problems didn't magically disappear with the red coats.

At the turn of the century, dentists were fighting for their professional lives.

Alyssa Picard is a medical historian and author of the book Making the American Mouth.

They agreed, we are in bad shape here because Americans have terrible teeth.

According to a report from 1909, no more than 8% of Americans had ever visited a dentist and 90% suffered from tooth decay.

On the verge of World War I, potential Army recruits needed to pass a simple dental inspection.

To prove they could chew their rations in the field, they had to show six opposing sets of teeth.

And at that point, one out of every three failed that standard.

A third rejected.

They didn't even have six sets of teeth.

So at this point, the US and UK were on pretty equal footing, or mouthing.

But the countries started to part ways in the years after World War II.

America burst out of the war as a superpower, and the American people now had buying power.

And all that, combined with scientific improvements that eased the pain of a dentist's visit, made Americans a lot more willing to spend time and money fixing their mouths.

Post-war Americans were soon inundated with toothpaste and mouthwash ads that based their appeal on aesthetics because improving dental hygiene would bring a brighter smile and with it perhaps even romance.

Darn it, Sally, what did I do to ruffle your feathers?

Every time I try and kiss you lately, you give me the bird.

Listen, Tom, nobody's going to cool with you until...

until you see your dentist.

Make it slappy, choppy!

But there was one discovery that more than anything turned dental aesthetics into an American obsession.

Decades earlier, dentists had noticed that something unusual was happening to the teeth of people living in certain parts of the American West.

They had yellow and brown staining on their teeth, but bizarrely, they also had teeth that were intensely resistant to decay.

And of course, dentists got really interested in the question of why this was the case.

Over the 1930s, they conducted scientific studies in those locations to try to determine the cause.

And they reached the scientific conclusion, it's the fluoride.

What is fluoride?

It is a natural substance found in varying degrees in nearly all water and and most foods.

As a mineral, fluoride can naturally flow from rocks and soil into water sources.

Scientists realized that in all of the places where people were getting discolored but very strong teeth, the local water supplies contain very high natural levels of it.

So they began to wonder what would happen if they put very low doses into the water supplies of locations whose landscapes provided less of the stuff.

If that could build stronger enamel for everyone without causing staining, it would be a game changer, especially for kids.

It can be critical in helping to make sure that the enamel that's forming for their permanent teeth is actually going to be robust enough to stand up to decay.

Beginning in 1945, they conducted tests artificially fluoridating the water in cities across America.

And finding in the places where we fluoridated the water, the level of decay dropped by 90%.

Now our children can have better health through fluoridated water.

They can drink away tomorrow's tooth decay.

And so dentists began a series of public health campaigns to convince municipalities all across America to fluoridate their water.

That's why we of your health department feel that fluoridation merits your approval.

But even with the overwhelming evidence about the benefits of fluoride in just about every municipality, there were loud and deeply suspicious citizens who offered fierce resistance.

What do you mean, fluoride?

I like my water clean and pure, not doped up with a lot of chemicals.

It's against the laws of nature.

It's an unnatural poison you want to feed our kids.

And now here they are showing up at every single municipal meeting, coming at them with the argument that it's gonna weaken people's brains and turn them into communists and make them more susceptible to various other kinds of illnesses for which there was no real evidence.

It attacks the bones, kidneys, and hearts of older people and increases the chance of cancer.

It's an infringement on human rights, a communist conspiracy where the people are helpless to resist.

Dentists found this experience bruising, chafing, and infuriating.

Those statements are not right.

There is absolutely no danger.

These battles would go on for decades, deep into the 2000s, often egged on by conspiratorial far-right organizations.

For the most part though, the dentists were persuasive.

In most municipalities, despite the opposition, they were able to convince communities to add fluoride to the water.

Today, more than 200 million Americans have fluoridated water, including residents of 42 of the 50 largest cities.

For the generations who have grown up with fluoride, teeth are now strong, cavity resistant and long-lasting as a matter of course.

You no longer expect your teeth to rot, fall out or need to be pulled.

You expect to keep them for life.

It was an incredible accomplishment.

What many historians continue to see as one of the greatest public health achievements of the 20th century.

But this public health achievement is also the key to understanding how America became obsessed with gleaming straight smiles.

Because when fluoride largely solved the problem of dental health as it had existed to that point, dentists suddenly had to find some new things to do.

We've just had the slate cleaned.

We now have an opportunity to do things that we were not able to do before because our time is not being spent on drilling, filling, and extracting, and debating with patients which of these we would do.

Now we could do some other stuff.

Fluoridation provided a reset for the entire American dental profession, and that reset would primarily concern itself with

braces.

Dentists had developed a whole index of arguments that they could make for how could you pitch orthodontics to somebody.

And there are some real reasons that it's an attractive idea.

If you move around the teeth in somebody's mouth, you might actually make it easier for them to chew and bite and maintain all their teeth for a lifetime.

You might make it easier for them to clean their teeth adequately.

That is absolutely true.

It's the reason that I had braces as an adult and straightening my teeth really did make it a lot easier to clean them properly.

But that was never the main reason Americans got sold on orthodontics.

Dentists always saw that it was arguments for aesthetics that were the most effective pitch to patients.

Of course, straight white teeth look great.

Braces were an easy sell, even if they were expensive and not always medically necessary.

They were also lucrative.

The bruising squabbles about water fluoridation had left American dentists feeling disrespected by the public.

So they pivoted away from public health for everyone toward increasingly intense levels of treatment for those patients who could afford it.

Treatment that dentists also stood to make money on.

And so, in the post-fluoridated world, a new set of American standards was was born.

And that includes having astonishing, glistening white teeth at all times.

Once they're the norm, they become a necessity.

A gleaming American smile turned into a status symbol.

And not having one, a social liability.

I'm not going to be able to get a job.

I'm going to have a hard time getting a mate.

People are going to think of me as, you know, subhuman.

You don't want that to happen to you.

Parents had the message drilled into them that the choice to take their kids to the orthodontist might determine their future success.

And over the progression of the 20th century, land where we are today in a place where for middle or upper middle class aspirational folks in the United States, getting your teeth done by an orthodontist was a normative part of childhood.

Where you can walk into a dentist's office, the dentist may be offering you medical spa services while you are receiving health care.

And orthodontics is just just the beginning.

Whitening, veneers, everything's on the table.

It's all expensive and very little of it is geared toward healthy teeth.

But across the ocean, things turned out very differently.

When Americans were adding fluoride to their water, the British were not.

To this day, fewer than 10% of UK residents have community fluoridated water.

Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland don't have any fluoridation at all.

And the ultra-white, ultra-straight smile isn't quite the norm.

And yet, British teeth, a little beige, a little crooked though they may be, are in general healthier.

And that's because there is a whole other side to this story, one that also traces back to the period just after World War II.

At almost exactly the same time that Americans were turning to fluoridation, Great Britain was engaged in its own vast new public health initiative, an even more radical path that may not have produced Hollywood smiles, but would have transformative consequences for teeth.

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Matthew Thompson is a historian of modern Britain at the University of Warwick, where he teaches the history of medicine.

And several years back, something happened that got him thinking.

I guess this must have been quite soon after the death of David Bowie.

It's one of those, do you remember where you were when you heard the news moments?

To his fans, he was simply one of the most important and original figures in the history of rock music.

I was listening to all the obituaries, and there was this whole thing about his shape-shifting kind of history.

Over a career spanning four decades, he continually reinvented himself and his music, from the alien rock star Ziggy Stardust to the thin white duke.

He just changed and changed and changed and changed.

And I thought, well, actually, there's one part of that shape-shifting history that no one talked about at all, in fact.

When you actually look at pictures of him in kind of the early 70s and then look at pictures of him now, his teeth are spectacularly different.

At the beginning of his career, Bowie's teeth were yellow, overcrowded and misaligned.

I know they're not very straight, but they're the only ones I've got.

But as he enjoyed more success, his teeth seemed to evolve.

The ones that he ends up with, they're pretty, you know, they're white and straight, yeah,

and less interesting, I think.

Matthew realised he preferred Bowie's original teeth, imperfections and all.

I mean, I think they're very engagingly crooked and yellow.

I mean, for me, that's part of the attractiveness of David Bowie in that period.

And it's sort of, I don't know, for me, it really captures his personality in many ways as well.

There was beauty, confidence, swagger in that easy grin.

And the historian in Matthew recognised something even more significant.

Those imperfect teeth represented an absolute triumph of British healthcare, a crowning achievement of one of our greatest treasures.

The National Health Service, a state medical service which everyone in Britain is entitled to use, so that the expense of necessary treatment is no longer an obstacle to any who may need it.

The National Health Service is Britain's publicly funded healthcare system, and it's the country's most beloved institution.

It arrived in 1948, around the same time that America was starting to get serious about fluoridation.

The NHS meant that everyone could get medical, optical, and dental care, and it would be free at the point of delivery.

When you're ill, you won't have to pay for treatment.

It's all yours, whenever you want it, with your own choice of doctor.

I mean, the great thing about the Internet Service is it stops you thinking about healthcare.

You've just got your healthcare.

And among other things this led to a huge shift in Britain's relationship to our teeth.

I mean the big thing pre-National Health Service is a culture where you take your teeth out.

If they're bad you take them out.

So we've got our remedy haven't we?

Have the whole lot out.

The whole boiling.

And you got dentures.

Basically people thought that was just a good thing to do.

And once everybody could see a dentist, that's exactly what they did.

You know, one of the first things that happens, everyone rushes out to get their dentures.

That was the height of being modern and, you know, healthy, really, I think.

One million people got new dentures in the first nine months of the NHS.

My mother and father soon followed.

They both had all their teeth removed in one sitting in their homes before they were married.

It was just something that people did in their early 20s.

But after that initial extraction spree, as people got used to going to their NHS dentist and as dental treatment became less painful, the NHS began to push Brits in another direction toward actual treatment and preventative care.

Through public health information, encouraging children to use toothpaste.

Teaching children to make friends of their dentist is the latest idea in the campaign against Britain's toothache problem.

They try to make a treat out of treatment.

What happens quite quickly with the National Health Service is that our teeth rapidly get better, yeah, and they don't need to be taken out.

In a short time, the NHS had accomplished something remarkable.

It made it possible for British people to keep their teeth and at very little cost to the patient.

The NHS literally reshaped the British mouth, every British mouth.

What happens is that everybody's teeth, just like everyone's healthcare, quite quickly becomes becomes very, very similar.

You know, functional, not unhealthy, but not particularly pretty

teeth.

And that also shaped how Brits felt about their teeth.

If you've all got the similar sort of teeth, the posh boys and the poor boys, yeah, then it actually just becomes a kind of a norm.

It's not embarrassing, I suppose, which is the huge thing, isn't it?

Yeah,

you grow up thinking that that's nothing that remarkable.

So unremarkable, in fact, that for younger generations, overly pretty teeth began to signify something undesirable.

Perfect smiles suggested dentures, the ones they grew up seeing parents and grandparents remove at night.

For a moment then, the more imperfect smiles, like David Bowie's, signalled that the teeth in your mouth were actually your own.

And so, you see similar teeth all over the place, from pubs to palaces, on working-class oicks and minor royals.

British teeth may be imperfect, but they're equitable.

And that's not something you can say about American teeth.

Remember that study Richard Watt and his colleagues conducted?

The one that found that English teeth were on the whole healthier than American teeth?

Well, there was another, perhaps even more important, finding.

What came out particularly strongly was that the inequalities in oral health were much, much worse in the US than in England.

The researchers wanted to understand if there was a connection between oral health and socioeconomic status.

And in America, there certainly was.

The people with higher income or better education in the US had much fewer missing teeth than poorer people in the US.

Poorer people have bigger problems accessing care.

So, sure, there are plenty of Americans who can afford good dental care and fancy orthodontics, but there are also millions of Americans who don't have the means to see a dentist at all.

You can literally see class in American mouths.

But they found it was a very different story in England.

There was less of a difference across these economic groups, so this is a bit of a pun, but the gap, oral health gap, was much greater in the US.

My fellow Americans, please don't bite my head off.

I'm one of you.

I'm a naturalized US citizen.

But right now, I'm talking to you from my British roots with a claim you might find hard to swallow.

That so-called bad British teeth are actually a sign of something healthy, something democratic.

In Britain, it doesn't matter where you land on the socio-economic spectrum.

Rich or poor, oral health is pretty comparable.

So you may look at British teeth and see snaggles and stains, but I look at them and see a point of pride, a victory for equality, something Americans didn't get because the thought of socialised medicine sends you into a tizzy.

I don't want to suggest that the NHS solved every problem with healthcare and inequity.

Plenty of issues, especially around funding, remain.

And NHS dental care stopped being totally free a long time ago.

Nowadays, more and more people go private instead.

Costs are still much smaller than in the US, but the more people pay for treatment, the more they expect in return.

In more recent years, there has been a bigger shift towards having better aesthetics, whiter teeth, straighter teeth.

The people I spoke with at the dentistry show in Glasgow confirmed this trend.

Certainly, American culture has come over.

Everyone wants veneers, everyone wants invisible, everyone wants their teeth to look straight and have the classic Hollywood smile nowadays

more than in the past.

Social media has probably got a lot of trans for that because everyone's taking pictures, you know,

it's so much more now, like you smile, like take pictures, smile, smile, smile, smile.

You know, whereas years ago, you really only took pictures on holidays and special events.

You know, you didn't really have pictures taken all the time.

Whereas now, people take.

So I think people have become a little bit more conscious of how their teeth look.

And it's not just how they look to other Brits they need to be conscious of, as the actress Amy Lou Wood discovered after appearing on The White Lotus.

The 31-year-old actress is furious after Saturday Night Live mocked her overbite, calling the sketch mean and unfunny.

I look a monkey!

No,

not the monkey!

But Americans may not be laughing for much longer.

Because while fluoridation is what made American teeth healthy, there is now, in the face of all scientific evidence, a growing government-backed effort to do away with it.

Health Secretary Robert F.

Kennedy Jr.

doubling down on his calls to ban the mineral from public water supplies.

It makes no sense to have fluoride in our water.

In other words, brace yourself.

American and British teeth might be getting realigned.

Look, if I claimed I wouldn't have loved a gleaming American smile, I'd be lying through my teeth.

But I'm okay with my okay teeth.

I'm even okay joking about them.

Because I've come to view my meh mouth as a reflection of British national values at their best.

Egalitarianism, communitarianism, and modesty.

And of course, the great British tradition of self-deprecation.

It's kind of like, you know, it's make do with what we've got, and it's, you know, laughing at ourselves.

We're very good at laughing at ourselves, I think, but it's very affectionate.

Matthew Thompson told me about a poem that encapsulates all of this.

The British comedian Spike Milligan wrote it back in the 1950s, and it's called Simply Teeth.

I wrote it down because I

thought it was relevant, yeah.

So, English teeth, English teeth, shining in the sun a part of the British heritage aye each and every one

English teeth happy teeth always having fun clamping down on bits of fish and sausages half done

English teeth heroes teeth

hear them click and clack

Let's sing a song of praise to them.

Three cheers for them.

Brown, grey and black.

The poem is more than 70 years old now, and some of the details no longer pertain.

You hear a lot less of the click and clack of dentures these days, and teeth that were once brown, grey, and black today are more vanilla, ecrew, and cream.

But the evocation of joy, decency, and affection for imperfection, it still makes me smile.

This is Decodering.

I'm June Thomas.

And I'm Willip Haskin.

June's latest book is called A Place of Our Own, Six Spaces That Shape Queer Women's Culture.

I highly recommend you check it out.

I also want to direct you to a new bonus episode available right now exclusively for Slate Plus members.

In it, Slate writer and Decodering regular Henry Gerbar dives into the strange world of graduation commencement photos, a world he got intrigued by when his wife finished graduate school.

You know how it is, you try your best to take the best photo you can.

Then the graduate gets up there, and there's somebody up there with a really nice camera taking their photo with the dean and right in front of the flags and all that.

And so I thought, great, they took care of it.

They meaning the university.

But then it turns out, no.

Like, after all this time, they're really going to nickel and dime us over this commencement photo.

To hear more, sign up for Slate Plus.

You can do that from the Decodering show page on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or visit slate.com forward slash decodering plus to get access wherever you listen.

This episode was written by June Thomas and edited and produced by Evan Chung, Decodering Supervising Producer.

Our show is also produced by me, Katie Shepard, and Max Friedman.

Merritt Jacob is Senior Technical Director.

We'd like to thank the Decodering listener who suggested this topic to us on Twitter, but whose name is now all but impossible to find there.

Thank you.

If you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, please email us at decodering at slate.com or call us on our phone number, 347-460-7281.

We'd love to hear from you and we'd love to hear all of your ideas for the show.

We'll see you in two weeks.