Chew on this: American teeth are as bad as British teeth, study says

As a dental professional living in London, Richard Watt spent years watching as his colleagues became increasingly irritated with the constant jokes about British teeth.

The most offensive mockery, the gleeful pop culture references that seemed to signal it’s okay to be mean as long as it’s about teeth and people from Great Britain, originated from their brothers and sisters across the Atlantic.

There was American author Donna Tartt's description of a British character’s “rabbit teeth” in her Pulitzer-prize winning novel Goldfinch. The Simpsons episode where a dentist terrifies Springfield's resident oddball kid Ralph Wiggum into better brushing habits by showing him a book called The Big Book of British Smiles featuring national figures like Prince Charles with misaligned or misformed teeth. And who can forget super spy Austin Powers’ grotesquely discoloured grin in his three feature films?

In an effort to discover whether there's any truth to the widely-held belief, Watt teamed up with researchers from both countries to gather and analyse national data on the subject.

Their conclusion, published Wednesday in the journal BMJ, may be a shocker to those on our side of the ocean: Americans do not have better teeth than the English. In fact, by some measures Americans' teeth are actually worse. They have significantly more missing teeth and the inequalities in oral health are much wider between rich and poor in the United States than in Britain.

“We were very surprised with our findings,” said Watt, a Scottish professor of dental public health at University College London.