Is it just me or do you guys also notice many Brits and Japanese have bad teeth, particularly the front ones?
Yes, I might be stereo-typing these two island nations’ citizens but I’m not really saying they all have bad teeth, ie, it’s just that many of them do have noticeably bad teeth, at least from what I’ve noticed over the years. (I apologize in advance if I’m offending some folks but I don’t mean to; this is a sincere curiosity.)
I think your definitions of bad teeth do not match mine. If by “bad teeth” you mean “irregular, do not glow in the dark”, then I don’t consider those bad teeth. So long as they’re healthy and have a good bite, they’re perfectly fine teeth… they merely do not double as nightlights and are the shape they happened to grow rather than the shape a dentist forced them into.
Similarly with the rest of Europe, where they have similar teeth “quality” to the UK. Yet Americans seem obsessed with the Brits. Hell, I live in Sweden, allegedly the land of beautiful people, and the teeth are no different to the UK.
And a deliberate attempt to reinforce the ‘Brits have bad teeth’ stereotype.
Really, the issue isn’t that Brits have bad teeth, rather that Americans go in for a lot of artificial cosmetic dentistry, which makes them have more whitely polished straight teeth than the rest of the world. Brits are no different than other nations, except that you probably see more Brits on TV than other nations (because we speak English and produce a lot of TV/film). Plus, it is standard for our TV shows to portray real-looking people rather than Hollywood glossy types.
IME, the ‘Brits have bad teeth’ stereotype is confined to Americans. Other nations peddle stereotypes about our food, or say our men folk are ‘effeminate’, but they don’t mention our teeth.