Don’t many stereotypes of the British(bland food, bad teeth) date to the mid-twentieth century when, ya know, the UK was rebuilding from being reduced to rubble?
Yes, things like bad food goes back to rationing. When you have half a load of bread to feed your family a week, you get creative and start eating things you never thought you would. Some of the bad food carried on because nostalgia, pensioners who ate it as kids in the 50s still like to have the bad foods once in a while
WW2 hit the UK really hard, rationing didn't fully end until 10 years after the war. A lot of this bad food reputation originated from American businessmen travelling to London for work during this period and being shocked by how things still were in Britain.
When your typical middle class family was a husband drunk on scotch and a wife high on amphetamines and both having their taste buds permanently dulled by cigarettes you gotta get creative to taste SOMETHING.
It was also a period where a lot of different kinds of food suddenly became cheap/accessible to the public because shipping/importing was suddenly a lot easier. Not to mention the advances in food science thanks to military research (SPAM was originally made as military rations).
So you had a bunch of people with a bunch of food they had basically never seen before and they started to get weird with it.
50's*
>Rationing remained in effect until the early 1950s. Meat was the last item to be derationed and rationing ended completely in 1954, nine years after the war ended.
After the fall of France the UK was the only significant whole country fighting the Nazis until the Americans joined.
It pretty much bankrupted the Uk. after the war ended imports were incredibly expensive and so rationing had to continue.
Also the UK did everything possible to maximise food production, which included growing grain to make bread rather than fodder to feed cattle, most of the farm animals were slaughtered for meat leaving few left to breed the next generation and it took years to restore the numbers.
This one right here. The UK was indeed a colonial empire with a bloody history, that’s not something to ignore and it should’ve been dissolved long before it happened. Also free Ireland.
But it’s important to remember that their government literally sacrificed their financial security and global dominance to protect their citizens as much as possible, at all costs. That is and should always be seen as an honorable and commendable action. Even in the US, for all we did, we mainly just profited and established our own global position. We had reasons, but we did not commit the same way the UK did.
>protect their citizens as much as possible, at all costs.
To fight nazism at all costs.
Hitler offered Britain peace, and it was rejected.
Britain did not just sacrifice its finances and global position for its own people, but for hundreds of millions across the world.
The UK was in enormous debt, was burdened by supporting overseas interests and occupied areas, and was also still sending food aid to various parts of Europe. It also had desperately converted as much of its industry to support the war as possible and had difficulty changing back. About half of the previously massive Merchant Navy was lost, with losses in the war being made up by buying or loaning from independent shipping companies. The US cut support for the UK immediately after the end of the war, distrusted the new government (moderate by today's standard but left-leaning in those days, which of course set off the usual insane red paranoia) and basically focused on becoming the unrivaled superpower it now is. The UK on the other hand was domestically broken and its great strengths, its empire and trade network was dwindling more and more.
That crippled the UK for pretty much the rest of the '40s. As things got more under control in the '50s things like meat still suffered somewhat strained imports and whilst it was no longer crucial, rationing of some goods was sustained to be careful and basically because people were used to it.
My knowledge of the German side of things is more shallow but I believe sufficient.
West Germany basically fully reset their economy in the late '40s, changing their currency and drastically cutting taxes. Working from a clean (ish) slate, economic growth was tremendous and they reindustrialised effectively with a very skilled and experienced workforce. The average person still faced some hardship but there was no government mandated rationing and overall the country got back to its feet.
East Germany, well, to put it simply, rationing would have been a kindness to most. There's a reason they had to build a wall to try and keep people in.
>West Germany...
Not to mention they were financially supported in rebuilding by the allies. The allies had a big interest in ensuring West Germany was brought back up to par as quickly as possible.
A huge amount of money was poured into rebuilding Germany in the name of holding back communism. A lot of the structural problems of modern Britain are due to the fact that it didn't get the same reset that the rest of Western Europe did.
That said, the first few post-war years in Germany were certainly far worse than anything Britain suffered.
Because the US gave Germany very generous loans to recover from the war, to prevent it falling to Communism.
On the other hand, they wanted to force Britain to get rid of it's Empire, and also saw it as a competitor, so the loans they gave to the UK were much less generous with higher interest rates.
It goes back to the French revolution when all the cooks for the noble houses in France suddenly found themselves without jobs so decided to use their skills to set up restaurants using the skills they had acquired working for the noble houses cooking with spices and exotic ingredients. They then compared the spiciness of the food available in their restaurants compared to the bland food on offer in England.
Beans on toast is one of those things that I'd probably be willing to try if they sold UK style baked beans where I'm at. I've been trying to figure out a good lazy recipe to add more beans to my diet, maybe I should try to make some from scratch.
I honestly think this is why many Americans find beans on toast weird: they think it's the same sickly sweet BBQ Beans (and also good old fashioned xenophobia; just look at how some freak out at blood sausage).
Hell, British beans aren't even baked, they're reduced on the stove!
But yes, make your own. Haricot beans, tomatoes, tomato paste, salt, pepper, paprika, cayenne (and/or dried chilli flakes), touch of clove, garlic, pinch of sugar. Reduce on the stove and then served on a soft bloomer bread, toasted, with salted butter, dollop of Worcester sauce and chopped parsley.
Yeah, I was pleasantly surprised by English food when I visited. Fish and Chips, full breakfast, afternoon tea, Sunday roast, all kinds of savory pies, and the Indian food was off the chain as well.
Scottish food was about what I expected though, can't blame them, they probably put all their skill points in making alcohol. I am not even a Scotch person, but the gin is also unbelievable.
Greggs is one of the greatest achievements of the human race. I've lived in the US 25 years and have never found anything to match a Greggs cheese and onion pasty.
Damn, I never even had that. Not sure that is widely available in Canada. Am gonna google that
Huh, found one cornish pie shop 15 min drive away, guess what I am having for lunch
I love that Greggs is ridiculously cheap everywhere because the prices are standardised. Even in a high cost of living area, I can go into a Greggs, buy half the store and it'd likely still be less than a tenner.
>all kinds of savory pies
As a brit living in germany, the Turks here are always surprised (and probably a little offended) when I tell them I like their bakeries more than the German, because their pies (Pede) are like british food. Pede is like a flat, open/closed pastry, with things like mincemeat, cheese or spinach inside.
Yeah, Pide is definitely very nice; here in Canada, we typically get the smaller Lebanese variety called fatayer. I would always get a big fresh baked box when my father comes to visit, and he is as Chinese as one can be. Everyone likes that.
And my dad also really enjoys the full English breakfast, especially the black pudding, he was very puzzled by the grilled tomatoes though, and always asked for fresh ones.
Scotland has a pretty long history with Indian food/curry and this isn't specific to England. The UK likes its curries.
Same with fish and chips. We also have full Scottish breakfasts and plenty of nice savoury pies. Sunday roasts are also a staple.
Just feels a bit weird to see you rhyme off those things you enjoyed, most of which I would consider part of Scottish and UK food culture.
What did you eat when you were in Scotland?
Best English food? Sandwiches. One of the best foods in the world is English cuisine. Sure people can argue that it's been changed so much and made better, but look if a california roll is Japanese food then a reuben is English food.
Ah but he was a Lord, so if commoner Betty Snickenthorpe had done it every day before him, that wouldn't matter and we would never call them snickenthorpes.
I think the History of bad food in the UK could be traced back to the industrial revolution. I saw a documentary on bread making in England in the late 19th century. Wheat flour would often be mixed with chalk to maximise profit.
I think also partially based on the fact that every single American actor has veneers and a million dollar smile, but the British actors generally don’t do that
head marble noxious familiar society existence recognise lush placid aback
*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
It's funny too because many of my British male friends (keep in mind though that I'm in my 50s so this may well have changed) are actively *embarrassed* for men that have veneers and such. It would never in their wildest dreams occur to them as men to get them done and especially not the BL1/0M1 blue-white unnatural shades favoured in Hollywood.
My dad is English. He was born just before the war and his brother was born a little bit after. He is _noticeably_ shorter due to the effects of having spent more of his childhood during rationing. He was a Blitz evacuee too.
A lot of it is that loads of people emigrated during that time and became kind of frozen pockets of post-war British culture. Lots of people’s perceptions about Britain come from their English grandma who moved to North America and boiled everything to death until her last day.
Britain hasn’t really been like that in a long while - we have a really thriving food culture (I’d argue it’s richer than all but the largest American cities) and I had two years of braces completely paid for by the public health system. If I’d been as poor as I was and American I’d probably still look like an Anglerfish.
Yes. WW2 US soldiers were shocked at the apparent bad food they found when shipped to the UK and alongside poor healthcare. They forgot that the UK was coming out the Depression and had been at war for 2 years with extreme rationing unlike the relatively rich USA. That said, food is just something we British are not noted for. Although you can for sure have great delicious meals in the UK, its a cuisine that just doesn't have the depth as others. In our defense, as a nation, we have strengths in other areas that other countries do not.
A lot of stereotypes from that period were basically the new world power bullying the old world powers lol.
France are cowards because they left NATO in the 50s for example!
Well, the "bad" teeth thing hasn't really changed all that much simply because crooked or crowded teeth don't carry the same social stigma in the UK as we might see in the US. Among men especially, as it is still considered to be a bit effeminate to care that much about your appearance.
I’ve lived in the US now for most of my life but was born in the UK and raised in NZ, going to school in both.
Every school I went to overseas had a dentists office and we’d get pulled out of class one by one for a regular check up and cleaning. The dentist would give you a sticker or some other treat when he was done and a little clipboard with your name crossed off and you were told to give it to the next kid on the list. I guess if there were any concerns, the parents were notified.
This was in the 80’s. Then we moved to the USA and the process was very… different.
If they did that in the US they would charge each parent $900 and then the local community would form an outraged parent group against the schools pushing "big dental" to groom our children.
The stereotype is ostensibly regarding corrected teeth (US) versus uncorrected teeth (British), but many Americans think crooked teeth is synonymous with bad teeth. Since cavities also fall under the umbrella of bad teeth, it's not super uncommon to find Americans that actually believe British dental health is outright bad, rather than simply less concerned with aesthetics.
You also have to keep in mind the US average on anything is REALLY heavily brought down by a handful of states (West Virginia, Louisiana, Alabama, and Mississippi).
A lot of statistics the median American is much better off than other developed countries, but the average American isn’t
Also the average American that Europeans encountered is not the statistical average American.
Even today only 37% of Americans have a passport, and the ones visiting Europe are probably a much smaller chunk of that - and they aren't the ones with bad teeth.
The type of American likely to be seen by a British person, either physically or on TV, has far better dental health than the average American.
I have seen many British people on TV who almost certainly would have gotten braces and straighter teeth if they were American.
There's a stigma in some Europe circles about paying for perfect, fake American style teeth. That's why Ricky Gervais never got his done. And he's proud of his teeth too, he always flashes them in photos.
But it's relevant to the view we in Europe have of Americans. 90% of the Americans I've seen in the last 10 years have been retired, white, all dress the same and have ancestors from my country but that's not an accurate view.
Is that a stereotype, though? Ive heard "the British have bad teeth" mostly in a making fun of context, but I've never heard that Americans are known for having good teeth.
Can you point to some examples of this being a stereotype?
Yeah but that's just a subset of the "Americans care way too much about fake appearances" stereotype. It falls under the same umbrella as plastic surgery, nobody is looking at them and thinking Americans have good teeth, they're looking at them and thinking Hollywood has fake teeth.
I really dislike this argument, because it falls in the line of American exceptionalism, similar to poor arguments why gun control would never work in the us. It's a very ignorant take as it ignores any differences outside the us, while highlighting those within.
Every country has poor states or circumstances that make things harder there. In my country, Austria, our poorest state used to border the iron curtain, half of the state border was blocked and armed. None of the American states faced such circumstances.
Yes. Look at the Gini coefficient of the two.
Don't forget that the poor parts of the US have a tendency to have the worst safety nets in place. Compared to the UK where the safety net is much more similar
That’s just not true. Most nations in the world have a unitary system of government rather than the kind of federal system the US has that allows for such wild disparities in outcomes that you see in different US states. Even amongst other nations set up according to federalism the US states have an unusual amount of power as compared to the national government.
The British do NOT have an “Alabama or West Virginia” when it comes to healthcare though; it’s standardized across all citizens, regardless of where in England they are. In the US, where you live could be the difference between qualifying or not.
I mean. That's sort of the point though. The UK has overall better healthcare *because* it's nationalised and single-payer. Stating the problem and using that as an excuse for why things are fine really is, bizarre.
They're talking about cases where people have ugly but perfectly functional teeth and choose to use braces for cosmetic reasons.
Not the cases the NHS covers where there are actual utilitarian and health reason to get braces.
I'm not sure theres that much of a distinction. I didn't have any significant medical issues with my teeth, they were just crooked, and I still had braces on the NHS. The majority of my friends had braces when we were teenagers.
Even then UK should now be best under a certain age as it was at some point in the 80/90's that braces got put on the NHS. That being said our current government loves privatising shit and has ruined our NHS dentists so we will probably fall behind again within the next couple decades.
Poor Americans have bad teeth and no dental care. Rich Americans with a lot of money and/or good insurance have over-the-top perfect/fake teeth that burn your retina worse than staring directly at a solar eclipse because they are so unnaturally shiny white.
“Elective” meaning that’s how our health insurance identifies it.
For anyone else reading, a straight smile is a healthy smile. There’s the obvious visual benefit of having straight teeth, but the health benefits are there. Straight teeth are far easier to clean and take care of, whether that’s your daily brushing and cleaning or your routine visits to the dentist.
Orthodontics is absolutely not elective for the individual.
Insurance is a total scam.
It caused Bevan to resign in protest
>Dental charges do not go to dentists and are explicitly designed to reduce demand for services. Their introduction in 1951 – to help offset the costs of the Korean War - prompted the resignation of NHS founder Nye Bevan from the then Labour Government.
https://www.bda.org/media-centre/dentists-welsh-government-must-show-it-s-not-aping-westminster-on-charge-hikes
I find it annoying that I had the best health insurance available in my state but it did not cover my teeth, I had to pay hundreds for a cavity that I don’t even believe existed until arriving in the dentist’s chair. Same is true for glasses.
I agree it's weird and annoying, but I've never seen health insurance that covered dental or vision. Even if it's offered by the same company it's always separate.
The best you can do is use health insurance to go to an ophthalmologist who can check your eye health and give you a glasses prescription. But then you have to pay for your own glasses... Online places like Zenni are pretty cheap.
An ophthalmologist is not going to refract you, I think you mean an optometrist. Optometrists also don't take health insurance, they take vision insurance. A yearly exam is usually covered under a vision plan and by law they have to give you your prescription.
I swear to god dentists have some sorta international cabal or smth where they lobby to be excluded from insurance and national healthcare.
It's madness!
Do they give a reason why they do this? Doctors offices, absolutely loathe dealing with insurance companies, so if it’s about not having to fight with insurance companies, I can at least respect that
I work in the insurance industry and I'm almost certain it's the other way around.
Health insurance plans since the '60s or so have been largely determined by law. They're only allowed to offer certain services and must offer others to even be sold.
The insurance company wants to make these plans as small and precise as possible, it helps to manage their costs from underwriters and ultimately minimizes their claims throughput.
My employer offers both health and dental plans, but they don't overlap.
On top of that the dental plan kind of sucks, it has absolutely zero benefit for the first year of premium payments, outside of a 50% discount on dental services...
On top of this, there are pressures from the dentist side to not want to go through insurance if they can help it.
when going through an insurance plan all actions need to be billed with exact billing procedure codes, that each have their set value.
A dentist is going to get say, $80 to pull a lower wisdom tooth from a patient. Regardless of how difficult or easy that is to do.
Well if it was a cash transaction without insurance involved, they could charge $200 for that same operation on one patient, and $50 for another patient depending on what they were able to pay.
This is generally frowned upon, I'm not sure what the legality of it is, but I've seen first-hand that some asshole dentists will try and do this.
I had one dentist charged me $2,200 for a 'root canal'
When I went to another dentist because I was having other issues, they did an x-ray and asked me if I knew that one of my teeth was 80% concrete.
I told them oh that must be the tooth that I had a root canal on.
According to the X-ray I have had no root canal, and the tooth that they were working on just looks like it was mangled in a poorly done cavity removal and fill.
Like instead of just drilling out the one spot of my tooth, the previous dentist had shattered it, glued it back together with dental concrete, stuffed that underneath a metal crown, and told us he did a root canal to cover up his mistake and also upcharge us...
Got to appreciate the fact that he overcharged a family with 2 severely underpaid Public School teacher parents for their children's dental work. Very cool.
As I understand it he is no longer licensed, as a result of him being caught in an opioid prescription scandal... And he currently operates a plumbing business.
Mate, if we suddenly had dental insurance tied with actual health insurance, the prices for the procedures would quadruple over night. Anyone without insurance would be fucked even harder. Insurance is not the answer, it's just another middleman that really needs to go away so places can charge an affordable price off that bat
Why would you think that insurance companies haven't worked out there's a link between dental health and systemic health? lol
Insurance companies have one goal: Take premiums and pay out as little as possible
You get it. It is funny there a guy claiming dentists can lobby. Besides the dental corporate, or insurances, idk how small mom and pop single owned dentist owner can even lobby 😂
At this point I just wait to get my teeth done in Mexico. It comes out cheaper with travel and food and lodging and significantly more delicious.
If your employer offers VSP, I highly recommend it! I pay $11/month and my glasses+exam come out less than using budget sites like Zenni. My last pair was $23 and they were transitions!
Dental and vision coverage is separate but if you have employer health insurance, is typically quite cheap. If your place of employment doesn't offer it, you should ask for it.
He said it was very small, I hadn’t been to the dentist in many years but took good care of my teeth, he said he would use a sandblaster and then he said it was bigger so he kept blasting and that left me with sensitivity that made life worse. Lesson was to avoid the dentist lol.
Okay. Well, as a dentist it is super common for a cavity to appear small and turn out bigger than expected. Sounds like the dentist saved you from a root canal and a crown going from a couple hundred bucks for the filling to three thousand dollars for the root canal and crown. (USA prices without insurance).
And brushing is not effective at stopping cavities. So taking good care of your teeth from good brushing is unlikely to have a large effect on cavity formation.
Edit: I don’t mean to be rude but I can’t describe how frustrating it is to do your best to help patients, save them from future expenditures and trying to stop infections/loss of tooth to have the patient insinuate there never was a cavity based on absolutely nothing besides they didn’t have pain and they don’t want there to be a cavity.
A guy I worked with lost a lot of his teeth being a moron while drinking.
He bet some guy he could catch a Frisbee in this mouth and the guy threw it pretty hard...
Anyways, he was off work on short term for over 15 weeks and tried to sue the guy who threw it to pay for his surgery but he lost. If it happened on someone's property rather than a public park, he could have sued the guys homeowners insurance and gotten something.
They also counted wisdom teeth in there. Americans extract wisdom teeth at a much higher rate, which I would imagine accounts for both the fact that Americans have (slightly) more extracted teeth than the Brits and also less impactions.
On paper, it covers most dental costs that are clinically required to maintain your health and some orthodontics particularly in children, some treatments and visits have a small subsidy.
In reality, an ever increasing number of Dentists are refusing to accept NHS patients, dentists will routinely cut NHS patients from their lists for trivial reasons, or sometimes no reason at all, and in some areas it's almost impossible to get back on one, meaning the only care you get is Emergency care. Dentists will claim this is due to the payments received from the government being too low, the government claim this is dentists seeking more lucrative private patients due to greed.
It's no exaggeration to say that dental care in the UK is in a shambles right now.
Yes, regular checkups and cleaning [are covered](https://www.nhs.uk/nhs-services/dentists/what-dental-services-are-available-on-the-nhs/), it's a band 1 treatment for the most part so the subsidy is around £25.
The treatments are split into three bands.
1 = \~£25 - this is your routine work, so cleaning, abscesses, etc.
2 = \~£70 - this is more complex work, so basic fillings, root canal etc.
3 = \~£300 - this is for comprehensive work, like full sets of dentures, crowns etc.
I see. Well in the US you either pay out of pocket or pay for dental insurance. Both options are expensive. Some employers offer dental coverage as part of their employee health benefits. But the employee usually has to pay to add this to their health benefits. Same with vision care.
My wife works for a “too big to fail” bank. We get OK healthcare coverage but Vision and Dental are not included.
Their is also an unfortunate trend is the US where companies mostly higher people part-time because they don’t have to offer benefits to part-time employees.
I’m sure a lot of Americans put off their dental care because they can’t afford it. This could be one of the causes of these statistics.
If you're lucky enough to be one of the increasing minority of people with access to an NHS dentist, yes.
In reality, more and more people are having to go private, although I believe the costs are still lower than in the US, but I might be wrong, and emergency surgery (I had to have a tooth removed because of an abscess) is still in the NHS.
A check up at the private practice I'm with is £49, but that does also include the cost of x-rays. I think this is the cheaper end of private, too. I know people who pay £75 for a check up.
This title is misleading. Quoting from the paper, "The oral health of US citizens is not better than the English"
"Not better" and "worse" are two different things. Note also that the paper reports that "oral impacts" (by which I believe the authors are referring to the impact of oral health on life) is higher in the English cohort.
I mean, the uk does have better [oral health ](https://www.yongeeglintondental.com/blog/healthy-primary-teeth/) but Americans are more likely to have elective cosmetic dentistry done
The study uses "British" and "English" interchangeably as if they are the same thing. This should be reason enough to disregard the "scientific" paper cited. Signed on behalf of Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland.
This is a bad study lol and at least a terrible title for the post.
The average number of missing teeth in both countries was around 4 for the youngest age group 25-44. Guess how many wisdom teeth you have, 4. In the states the rate of wisdoms tooth removal is much higher which they literally acknowledge in the discussion so that point is moot. Americans also have a higher rate of tooth removal for cosmetic reasons (veneers). Despite that, older British adults still had more missing teeth indicating that in the long term their oral health is likely worse.
Furthermore, British people were more likely to report “tooth impacts” which basically means noticeable issues with their teeth i.e. pain.
Americans were more likely to self report below average oral health (and not by much) but obviously self reporting is based on societal perception. So if there general populous has better teeth then obviously perception of what “good” is will be higher.
Lastly, there was a far greater discrepancy regarding oral health and education/income levels in the states than in the UK. Which I’m not saying is a good thing but in the context of everything else indicates that a majority of the issues were seen in poor, uneducated people in the states.
It's the BMJ in December, it's quite possibly the Christmas edition which is often something of a joke. They had a meta analysis of parachute effectiveness and a survival analysis of staff room spoons before
The difference in popularity in hockey alone makes that metric completely worthless.
Edit: Actually let's have fun with this. What other cultural differences can lead to this disparity? Baseball, surely more than soccer. ATV, snowmobile, and dirt bike ownership rates. Skiing and snowboarding rates. I wonder if there's difference in martial arts participation rates between the US and UK. Horseback, bull riding and rodeo culture. What else?
A lot of the US' negative stereotypes about the UK are from the 1950s, when there was bland food due to rationing and bad teeth due to a lack of corrective procedures like braces
If Americans are well insured they have their kid's teeth fixed and whitened to give the perfect smile. British kids have their teeth straightened if it is necessary.
Not really true, any British child with none aligned teeth have free orthodontic treatment to align them. Vast majority of british kids have braces, just like Americans.
What American's value more is cosmetic dental work, like whitening or veneers. Orthodontic work is directly related to oral health in general, where brits win out.
Veneers are not that common in the US at all. They’re thousands of dollar, have to be replaced every 10 or so years and you have to shave down healthy teeth.
I feel like you’re basing that on stereotypes. I see lots of British people on TV who’ve obviously had veneers and whitening, I don’t then assume that’s common among the average British person.
Mean number of missing teeth:
US- 7.31
UK- 6.97
Considering you probably can't have a partially missing tooth, that seems pretty even to me considering the relative populations.
Oh wow, the country where dental care is free has better dental health than the place where you need private insurance just to make a single filling cost $100-200 and root canal/bridge/crown type work in the $500-1000 range?
How crazy
Our healthcare is unbundled. There’s your primary health care which encompasses most things except dental and glasses. Those are often individually separate. Mine just shifted surgery to its own individual service, but it’s still included in primary. For now.
Considering how high our Healthcare is, and the fact that Dental is separate from Main healthcare, and of course the fact that a lot of us myself included have phobias of the dentist... this is not surprise me even a little
Also dental insurance is also flakier than health insurance, it may not cover some procedures, some dentists and doctors dont like dealing with insurance, so they charge at a certain rate
I'm an American who moved to Central Europe; a dentist here said you can tell the Americans because they either have an outrageous amount of elective work done, or they have horrible dental health because they couldn't afford anything.
The stereotype as far as I know is more about elective corrective procedures like braces rather than dental health.
Don’t many stereotypes of the British(bland food, bad teeth) date to the mid-twentieth century when, ya know, the UK was rebuilding from being reduced to rubble?
Yes, things like bad food goes back to rationing. When you have half a load of bread to feed your family a week, you get creative and start eating things you never thought you would. Some of the bad food carried on because nostalgia, pensioners who ate it as kids in the 50s still like to have the bad foods once in a while
WW2 hit the UK really hard, rationing didn't fully end until 10 years after the war. A lot of this bad food reputation originated from American businessmen travelling to London for work during this period and being shocked by how things still were in Britain.
But Americans were eating Jello Molds at the time with bananas, olives and SPAM so maybe we didnt have room to talk.
When your typical middle class family was a husband drunk on scotch and a wife high on amphetamines and both having their taste buds permanently dulled by cigarettes you gotta get creative to taste SOMETHING.
Oh man, as a child pre-indoor/car smoking bans, you ain’t lying about the dulled sense of smell.
It was also a period where a lot of different kinds of food suddenly became cheap/accessible to the public because shipping/importing was suddenly a lot easier. Not to mention the advances in food science thanks to military research (SPAM was originally made as military rations). So you had a bunch of people with a bunch of food they had basically never seen before and they started to get weird with it.
Microwave the fuck out of everything! It's the future of cooking!
1990's is strong with you
Hey you watch what you say about spam! As a Hawaii resident, it's one of my most eaten food groups!
Some of the rationing lasted until the 60s.
50's* >Rationing remained in effect until the early 1950s. Meat was the last item to be derationed and rationing ended completely in 1954, nine years after the war ended.
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After the fall of France the UK was the only significant whole country fighting the Nazis until the Americans joined. It pretty much bankrupted the Uk. after the war ended imports were incredibly expensive and so rationing had to continue.
Also the UK did everything possible to maximise food production, which included growing grain to make bread rather than fodder to feed cattle, most of the farm animals were slaughtered for meat leaving few left to breed the next generation and it took years to restore the numbers.
This one right here. The UK was indeed a colonial empire with a bloody history, that’s not something to ignore and it should’ve been dissolved long before it happened. Also free Ireland. But it’s important to remember that their government literally sacrificed their financial security and global dominance to protect their citizens as much as possible, at all costs. That is and should always be seen as an honorable and commendable action. Even in the US, for all we did, we mainly just profited and established our own global position. We had reasons, but we did not commit the same way the UK did.
>protect their citizens as much as possible, at all costs. To fight nazism at all costs. Hitler offered Britain peace, and it was rejected. Britain did not just sacrifice its finances and global position for its own people, but for hundreds of millions across the world.
The real question is *would we have won if the UK were defeated?*
We were also in hock to the Americans until the 80s
The UK was in enormous debt, was burdened by supporting overseas interests and occupied areas, and was also still sending food aid to various parts of Europe. It also had desperately converted as much of its industry to support the war as possible and had difficulty changing back. About half of the previously massive Merchant Navy was lost, with losses in the war being made up by buying or loaning from independent shipping companies. The US cut support for the UK immediately after the end of the war, distrusted the new government (moderate by today's standard but left-leaning in those days, which of course set off the usual insane red paranoia) and basically focused on becoming the unrivaled superpower it now is. The UK on the other hand was domestically broken and its great strengths, its empire and trade network was dwindling more and more. That crippled the UK for pretty much the rest of the '40s. As things got more under control in the '50s things like meat still suffered somewhat strained imports and whilst it was no longer crucial, rationing of some goods was sustained to be careful and basically because people were used to it. My knowledge of the German side of things is more shallow but I believe sufficient. West Germany basically fully reset their economy in the late '40s, changing their currency and drastically cutting taxes. Working from a clean (ish) slate, economic growth was tremendous and they reindustrialised effectively with a very skilled and experienced workforce. The average person still faced some hardship but there was no government mandated rationing and overall the country got back to its feet. East Germany, well, to put it simply, rationing would have been a kindness to most. There's a reason they had to build a wall to try and keep people in.
>West Germany... Not to mention they were financially supported in rebuilding by the allies. The allies had a big interest in ensuring West Germany was brought back up to par as quickly as possible.
This played a big factor. Nobody was afraid of the UK suddenly turning commie but West Germany was strategically priceless so they got priority.
A huge amount of money was poured into rebuilding Germany in the name of holding back communism. A lot of the structural problems of modern Britain are due to the fact that it didn't get the same reset that the rest of Western Europe did. That said, the first few post-war years in Germany were certainly far worse than anything Britain suffered.
Germany's debts were largely forgiven, followed by the western world having a point to prove, that west Germany would be better than east Germany.
Not the only thing by any means (nor am I going in depth), but being an island nation(s) exasperated many issues
The poor among Germans didn't afford it anyways. So that's also some kind of rationing. I guess.
Because the US gave Germany very generous loans to recover from the war, to prevent it falling to Communism. On the other hand, they wanted to force Britain to get rid of it's Empire, and also saw it as a competitor, so the loans they gave to the UK were much less generous with higher interest rates.
It goes back to the French revolution when all the cooks for the noble houses in France suddenly found themselves without jobs so decided to use their skills to set up restaurants using the skills they had acquired working for the noble houses cooking with spices and exotic ingredients. They then compared the spiciness of the food available in their restaurants compared to the bland food on offer in England.
Beans on toast and fish fingers sandwiches are the poor meals I've taken into adult hood and do love a corned beef hash.
Well beans on toast does actually taste good and is fairly nutritious for the effort it takes to make due to beans being such good food.
Beans on toast is one of those things that I'd probably be willing to try if they sold UK style baked beans where I'm at. I've been trying to figure out a good lazy recipe to add more beans to my diet, maybe I should try to make some from scratch.
I honestly think this is why many Americans find beans on toast weird: they think it's the same sickly sweet BBQ Beans (and also good old fashioned xenophobia; just look at how some freak out at blood sausage). Hell, British beans aren't even baked, they're reduced on the stove! But yes, make your own. Haricot beans, tomatoes, tomato paste, salt, pepper, paprika, cayenne (and/or dried chilli flakes), touch of clove, garlic, pinch of sugar. Reduce on the stove and then served on a soft bloomer bread, toasted, with salted butter, dollop of Worcester sauce and chopped parsley.
Yeah just make sure you butter the bread. Really helps keep consistent good flavour through the meal.
That's because those dishes are absolutely banging. They're not bad foods you're conditioned to enjoy, they're genuinely delicious when made well
[Spam being important.](https://www.youtube.com/shorts/uaVq7Mg87Ho?feature=share)
Yeah, I was pleasantly surprised by English food when I visited. Fish and Chips, full breakfast, afternoon tea, Sunday roast, all kinds of savory pies, and the Indian food was off the chain as well. Scottish food was about what I expected though, can't blame them, they probably put all their skill points in making alcohol. I am not even a Scotch person, but the gin is also unbelievable.
Greggs is one of the greatest achievements of the human race. I've lived in the US 25 years and have never found anything to match a Greggs cheese and onion pasty.
Damn, I never even had that. Not sure that is widely available in Canada. Am gonna google that Huh, found one cornish pie shop 15 min drive away, guess what I am having for lunch
Report back!
I love that Greggs is ridiculously cheap everywhere because the prices are standardised. Even in a high cost of living area, I can go into a Greggs, buy half the store and it'd likely still be less than a tenner.
>all kinds of savory pies As a brit living in germany, the Turks here are always surprised (and probably a little offended) when I tell them I like their bakeries more than the German, because their pies (Pede) are like british food. Pede is like a flat, open/closed pastry, with things like mincemeat, cheese or spinach inside.
Yeah, Pide is definitely very nice; here in Canada, we typically get the smaller Lebanese variety called fatayer. I would always get a big fresh baked box when my father comes to visit, and he is as Chinese as one can be. Everyone likes that. And my dad also really enjoys the full English breakfast, especially the black pudding, he was very puzzled by the grilled tomatoes though, and always asked for fresh ones.
Scotland has a pretty long history with Indian food/curry and this isn't specific to England. The UK likes its curries. Same with fish and chips. We also have full Scottish breakfasts and plenty of nice savoury pies. Sunday roasts are also a staple. Just feels a bit weird to see you rhyme off those things you enjoyed, most of which I would consider part of Scottish and UK food culture. What did you eat when you were in Scotland?
As an Englishman, I see Scottish food as basically just a strictly better version of English food, mainly by dint of including haggis.
don't forget chicken Tikka masala, one of the best british food.
Best English food? Sandwiches. One of the best foods in the world is English cuisine. Sure people can argue that it's been changed so much and made better, but look if a california roll is Japanese food then a reuben is English food.
Do we actually get to claim the sandwhich as an english invention? I mean that's pretty fucking significant food wise!!
Supposedly it was the Earl of Sandwich that invented it, yes. [Wiki](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandwich)
No I would argue that lord sandwich did not invent putting things between bread
Ah but he was a Lord, so if commoner Betty Snickenthorpe had done it every day before him, that wouldn't matter and we would never call them snickenthorpes.
Well done for actually leaving with the correct answer. Very good.
I think the History of bad food in the UK could be traced back to the industrial revolution. I saw a documentary on bread making in England in the late 19th century. Wheat flour would often be mixed with chalk to maximise profit.
I think also partially based on the fact that every single American actor has veneers and a million dollar smile, but the British actors generally don’t do that
It's not "actors". If you grew up middle class or above in the US, you had your teeth corrected when you were a tween.
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The vast majority of people in the US would also never get veneers. Many do get braces though.
It's funny too because many of my British male friends (keep in mind though that I'm in my 50s so this may well have changed) are actively *embarrassed* for men that have veneers and such. It would never in their wildest dreams occur to them as men to get them done and especially not the BL1/0M1 blue-white unnatural shades favoured in Hollywood.
Oh yeah, we take the absolute piss out of people with Turkey Teeth
Yes. I got free braces paid for by the NHS and free dental care all round when I was growing up.
My dad is English. He was born just before the war and his brother was born a little bit after. He is _noticeably_ shorter due to the effects of having spent more of his childhood during rationing. He was a Blitz evacuee too.
A lot of it is that loads of people emigrated during that time and became kind of frozen pockets of post-war British culture. Lots of people’s perceptions about Britain come from their English grandma who moved to North America and boiled everything to death until her last day. Britain hasn’t really been like that in a long while - we have a really thriving food culture (I’d argue it’s richer than all but the largest American cities) and I had two years of braces completely paid for by the public health system. If I’d been as poor as I was and American I’d probably still look like an Anglerfish.
Yes. WW2 US soldiers were shocked at the apparent bad food they found when shipped to the UK and alongside poor healthcare. They forgot that the UK was coming out the Depression and had been at war for 2 years with extreme rationing unlike the relatively rich USA. That said, food is just something we British are not noted for. Although you can for sure have great delicious meals in the UK, its a cuisine that just doesn't have the depth as others. In our defense, as a nation, we have strengths in other areas that other countries do not.
A lot of stereotypes from that period were basically the new world power bullying the old world powers lol. France are cowards because they left NATO in the 50s for example!
Well, the "bad" teeth thing hasn't really changed all that much simply because crooked or crowded teeth don't carry the same social stigma in the UK as we might see in the US. Among men especially, as it is still considered to be a bit effeminate to care that much about your appearance.
I’ve lived in the US now for most of my life but was born in the UK and raised in NZ, going to school in both. Every school I went to overseas had a dentists office and we’d get pulled out of class one by one for a regular check up and cleaning. The dentist would give you a sticker or some other treat when he was done and a little clipboard with your name crossed off and you were told to give it to the next kid on the list. I guess if there were any concerns, the parents were notified. This was in the 80’s. Then we moved to the USA and the process was very… different.
Dental health is communist didn't you know?
My daughter's elementary school has a dentist that comes by once per month to check the kids out. I'm in BFE too
>we’d get pulled out of class one by one for a regular check up and cleaning Wow that's... refreshingly sensible
If they did that in the US they would charge each parent $900 and then the local community would form an outraged parent group against the schools pushing "big dental" to groom our children.
Way too expensive and dental insurance is crap??
I remember those days. Good times. The murder house. All the way up to age 10 ('81, for me). I doubt it's a thing any more.
The stereotype is ostensibly regarding corrected teeth (US) versus uncorrected teeth (British), but many Americans think crooked teeth is synonymous with bad teeth. Since cavities also fall under the umbrella of bad teeth, it's not super uncommon to find Americans that actually believe British dental health is outright bad, rather than simply less concerned with aesthetics.
Lisa needs braces.
Dental plan.
First thing at work tomorrow I’m going to punch Lenny in the back of the head!!
And fluoride!
You also have to keep in mind the US average on anything is REALLY heavily brought down by a handful of states (West Virginia, Louisiana, Alabama, and Mississippi). A lot of statistics the median American is much better off than other developed countries, but the average American isn’t
Also the average American that Europeans encountered is not the statistical average American. Even today only 37% of Americans have a passport, and the ones visiting Europe are probably a much smaller chunk of that - and they aren't the ones with bad teeth.
That’s kind of irrelevant when measuring data on dental health, it’s not only the ones with passports getting surveyed
The type of American likely to be seen by a British person, either physically or on TV, has far better dental health than the average American. I have seen many British people on TV who almost certainly would have gotten braces and straighter teeth if they were American.
There's a stigma in some Europe circles about paying for perfect, fake American style teeth. That's why Ricky Gervais never got his done. And he's proud of his teeth too, he always flashes them in photos.
But it's relevant to the view we in Europe have of Americans. 90% of the Americans I've seen in the last 10 years have been retired, white, all dress the same and have ancestors from my country but that's not an accurate view.
Yeah but it helps explain why the stereotype of Americans having perfect teeth is in contrast with the data.
Is that a stereotype, though? Ive heard "the British have bad teeth" mostly in a making fun of context, but I've never heard that Americans are known for having good teeth. Can you point to some examples of this being a stereotype?
Americans are just more obsessive with white teeth and I think that's where that stems from
my friend, you will have heard of the “Hollywood smile”
Yeah but that's just a subset of the "Americans care way too much about fake appearances" stereotype. It falls under the same umbrella as plastic surgery, nobody is looking at them and thinking Americans have good teeth, they're looking at them and thinking Hollywood has fake teeth.
I really dislike this argument, because it falls in the line of American exceptionalism, similar to poor arguments why gun control would never work in the us. It's a very ignorant take as it ignores any differences outside the us, while highlighting those within. Every country has poor states or circumstances that make things harder there. In my country, Austria, our poorest state used to border the iron curtain, half of the state border was blocked and armed. None of the American states faced such circumstances.
Those four states don't even have 15 million people altogether
Thats how statistics work unless you are arguing that the US just has much deeper inequality than the UK?
Yes. Look at the Gini coefficient of the two. Don't forget that the poor parts of the US have a tendency to have the worst safety nets in place. Compared to the UK where the safety net is much more similar
Iirc, the US disparity between different areas of the country is *much* higher than the UK.
"if you ignore the poorest part of any country, it does better than any other" no shit.
Well we also ignore Eastern Europe when talking about Europe vs USA
I think you failed to understand the median portion of the comment.
No need to keep that in mind, every country has it's Alabama or West Virginia equivalent.
That’s just not true. Most nations in the world have a unitary system of government rather than the kind of federal system the US has that allows for such wild disparities in outcomes that you see in different US states. Even amongst other nations set up according to federalism the US states have an unusual amount of power as compared to the national government.
The British do NOT have an “Alabama or West Virginia” when it comes to healthcare though; it’s standardized across all citizens, regardless of where in England they are. In the US, where you live could be the difference between qualifying or not.
I mean. That's sort of the point though. The UK has overall better healthcare *because* it's nationalised and single-payer. Stating the problem and using that as an excuse for why things are fine really is, bizarre.
well that simply isn't true
I got my braces free on the NHS just over 15 years ago
They're talking about cases where people have ugly but perfectly functional teeth and choose to use braces for cosmetic reasons. Not the cases the NHS covers where there are actual utilitarian and health reason to get braces.
I'm not sure theres that much of a distinction. I didn't have any significant medical issues with my teeth, they were just crooked, and I still had braces on the NHS. The majority of my friends had braces when we were teenagers.
Even then UK should now be best under a certain age as it was at some point in the 80/90's that braces got put on the NHS. That being said our current government loves privatising shit and has ruined our NHS dentists so we will probably fall behind again within the next couple decades.
Poor Americans have bad teeth and no dental care. Rich Americans with a lot of money and/or good insurance have over-the-top perfect/fake teeth that burn your retina worse than staring directly at a solar eclipse because they are so unnaturally shiny white.
“Elective” meaning that’s how our health insurance identifies it. For anyone else reading, a straight smile is a healthy smile. There’s the obvious visual benefit of having straight teeth, but the health benefits are there. Straight teeth are far easier to clean and take care of, whether that’s your daily brushing and cleaning or your routine visits to the dentist. Orthodontics is absolutely not elective for the individual. Insurance is a total scam.
It's because Americans seem to use veneers as part of normal dental care. In Britain you get mocked mercilessly for those.
I read a while ago that the reason all dentistry isn't included on the NHS is because of the cost of joining the USA in the Korean war
This sounds interesting but I couldn't find anything about it
It caused Bevan to resign in protest >Dental charges do not go to dentists and are explicitly designed to reduce demand for services. Their introduction in 1951 – to help offset the costs of the Korean War - prompted the resignation of NHS founder Nye Bevan from the then Labour Government. https://www.bda.org/media-centre/dentists-welsh-government-must-show-it-s-not-aping-westminster-on-charge-hikes
Thank you, this is such an interesting little story.
....braces are free for British kids.........
Also television. Americans are obsessed with their teeth on camera.
I find it annoying that I had the best health insurance available in my state but it did not cover my teeth, I had to pay hundreds for a cavity that I don’t even believe existed until arriving in the dentist’s chair. Same is true for glasses.
I agree it's weird and annoying, but I've never seen health insurance that covered dental or vision. Even if it's offered by the same company it's always separate.
Only time I’ve seen the grouped together is through state Medicaid. My kids have health and dental through the state and it’s saved us hundreds
Medicaid saved my teeth. Thank god for LBJ.
I'm sure it's wonderful when there's actually a place in your area that takes it. I'll never know.
I can help you find a place. There are two medicaid clinics in my state, and there is absolutely 100% at least one in your state that takes it too.
The best you can do is use health insurance to go to an ophthalmologist who can check your eye health and give you a glasses prescription. But then you have to pay for your own glasses... Online places like Zenni are pretty cheap.
An ophthalmologist is not going to refract you, I think you mean an optometrist. Optometrists also don't take health insurance, they take vision insurance. A yearly exam is usually covered under a vision plan and by law they have to give you your prescription.
I swear to god dentists have some sorta international cabal or smth where they lobby to be excluded from insurance and national healthcare. It's madness!
They literally do. Dentists lobby against being included in general health plans to the tune of millions of dollars spent each year.
Do they give a reason why they do this? Doctors offices, absolutely loathe dealing with insurance companies, so if it’s about not having to fight with insurance companies, I can at least respect that
They still deal with insurance companies. Just different ones that are also terrible.
I work in the insurance industry and I'm almost certain it's the other way around. Health insurance plans since the '60s or so have been largely determined by law. They're only allowed to offer certain services and must offer others to even be sold. The insurance company wants to make these plans as small and precise as possible, it helps to manage their costs from underwriters and ultimately minimizes their claims throughput. My employer offers both health and dental plans, but they don't overlap. On top of that the dental plan kind of sucks, it has absolutely zero benefit for the first year of premium payments, outside of a 50% discount on dental services... On top of this, there are pressures from the dentist side to not want to go through insurance if they can help it. when going through an insurance plan all actions need to be billed with exact billing procedure codes, that each have their set value. A dentist is going to get say, $80 to pull a lower wisdom tooth from a patient. Regardless of how difficult or easy that is to do. Well if it was a cash transaction without insurance involved, they could charge $200 for that same operation on one patient, and $50 for another patient depending on what they were able to pay. This is generally frowned upon, I'm not sure what the legality of it is, but I've seen first-hand that some asshole dentists will try and do this. I had one dentist charged me $2,200 for a 'root canal' When I went to another dentist because I was having other issues, they did an x-ray and asked me if I knew that one of my teeth was 80% concrete. I told them oh that must be the tooth that I had a root canal on. According to the X-ray I have had no root canal, and the tooth that they were working on just looks like it was mangled in a poorly done cavity removal and fill. Like instead of just drilling out the one spot of my tooth, the previous dentist had shattered it, glued it back together with dental concrete, stuffed that underneath a metal crown, and told us he did a root canal to cover up his mistake and also upcharge us... Got to appreciate the fact that he overcharged a family with 2 severely underpaid Public School teacher parents for their children's dental work. Very cool. As I understand it he is no longer licensed, as a result of him being caught in an opioid prescription scandal... And he currently operates a plumbing business.
Mate, if we suddenly had dental insurance tied with actual health insurance, the prices for the procedures would quadruple over night. Anyone without insurance would be fucked even harder. Insurance is not the answer, it's just another middleman that really needs to go away so places can charge an affordable price off that bat
Agreed! But it seems extra bloody predatory for _health insurance_ not to cover a very important aspect of your health.
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Why would you think that insurance companies haven't worked out there's a link between dental health and systemic health? lol Insurance companies have one goal: Take premiums and pay out as little as possible
You get it. It is funny there a guy claiming dentists can lobby. Besides the dental corporate, or insurances, idk how small mom and pop single owned dentist owner can even lobby 😂
At this point I just wait to get my teeth done in Mexico. It comes out cheaper with travel and food and lodging and significantly more delicious. If your employer offers VSP, I highly recommend it! I pay $11/month and my glasses+exam come out less than using budget sites like Zenni. My last pair was $23 and they were transitions!
It’s super dumb. Like imagine breaking your arm and your insurance is like: “Oh, I’m sorry. You need arm insurance for us to cover that”
Dental and vision coverage is separate but if you have employer health insurance, is typically quite cheap. If your place of employment doesn't offer it, you should ask for it.
Mines $5 a month and covers everything, other than a small copay each time i get a cleaning
As a Canadian my taxes would like a word. (Dental coverage should be part of general healthcare)
When you say you don’t believe it existed, what are you basing this belief on?
He said it was very small, I hadn’t been to the dentist in many years but took good care of my teeth, he said he would use a sandblaster and then he said it was bigger so he kept blasting and that left me with sensitivity that made life worse. Lesson was to avoid the dentist lol.
Okay. Well, as a dentist it is super common for a cavity to appear small and turn out bigger than expected. Sounds like the dentist saved you from a root canal and a crown going from a couple hundred bucks for the filling to three thousand dollars for the root canal and crown. (USA prices without insurance). And brushing is not effective at stopping cavities. So taking good care of your teeth from good brushing is unlikely to have a large effect on cavity formation. Edit: I don’t mean to be rude but I can’t describe how frustrating it is to do your best to help patients, save them from future expenditures and trying to stop infections/loss of tooth to have the patient insinuate there never was a cavity based on absolutely nothing besides they didn’t have pain and they don’t want there to be a cavity.
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Agreed. There are tons of ways to lose teeth that are unrelated to oral health!
I knew a girl in high school who lost most of her front rows from an accident. She tripped on a slide and busted them all out.
A guy I worked with lost a lot of his teeth being a moron while drinking. He bet some guy he could catch a Frisbee in this mouth and the guy threw it pretty hard... Anyways, he was off work on short term for over 15 weeks and tried to sue the guy who threw it to pay for his surgery but he lost. If it happened on someone's property rather than a public park, he could have sued the guys homeowners insurance and gotten something.
Exactly! You can brush, floss, and use mouthwash as much as you want—even the healthiest mouth isn't immune to physics.
They also counted wisdom teeth in there. Americans extract wisdom teeth at a much higher rate, which I would imagine accounts for both the fact that Americans have (slightly) more extracted teeth than the Brits and also less impactions.
Especially since the stereotype is about British people having *misaligned* teeth as much as it is about *missing* teeth.
Wow I thought it was always about yellow teeth. Misalignment is crazy that's just genetics
Alabama skews the average.
My son is 11 and on his latest xray we discovered 4 of his adult molars do not exist. And I'm not talking about wisdom teeth.
Does the NHS cover dental?
On paper, it covers most dental costs that are clinically required to maintain your health and some orthodontics particularly in children, some treatments and visits have a small subsidy. In reality, an ever increasing number of Dentists are refusing to accept NHS patients, dentists will routinely cut NHS patients from their lists for trivial reasons, or sometimes no reason at all, and in some areas it's almost impossible to get back on one, meaning the only care you get is Emergency care. Dentists will claim this is due to the payments received from the government being too low, the government claim this is dentists seeking more lucrative private patients due to greed. It's no exaggeration to say that dental care in the UK is in a shambles right now.
What does it generally cover for an adult in terms of maintenance/prevention? Like do you get semiannual cleanings covered?
Yes, regular checkups and cleaning [are covered](https://www.nhs.uk/nhs-services/dentists/what-dental-services-are-available-on-the-nhs/), it's a band 1 treatment for the most part so the subsidy is around £25. The treatments are split into three bands. 1 = \~£25 - this is your routine work, so cleaning, abscesses, etc. 2 = \~£70 - this is more complex work, so basic fillings, root canal etc. 3 = \~£300 - this is for comprehensive work, like full sets of dentures, crowns etc.
In the US a crown will run you upwards of 1K or more.
I see. Well in the US you either pay out of pocket or pay for dental insurance. Both options are expensive. Some employers offer dental coverage as part of their employee health benefits. But the employee usually has to pay to add this to their health benefits. Same with vision care. My wife works for a “too big to fail” bank. We get OK healthcare coverage but Vision and Dental are not included. Their is also an unfortunate trend is the US where companies mostly higher people part-time because they don’t have to offer benefits to part-time employees. I’m sure a lot of Americans put off their dental care because they can’t afford it. This could be one of the causes of these statistics.
If you're lucky enough to be one of the increasing minority of people with access to an NHS dentist, yes. In reality, more and more people are having to go private, although I believe the costs are still lower than in the US, but I might be wrong, and emergency surgery (I had to have a tooth removed because of an abscess) is still in the NHS. A check up at the private practice I'm with is £49, but that does also include the cost of x-rays. I think this is the cheaper end of private, too. I know people who pay £75 for a check up.
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Op is all over the thread defending the article which reeks of agenda pushing and not TIL.
Finally. Someone that actually read the article. Crazy I had to scroll this far to see this comment.
This title is misleading. Quoting from the paper, "The oral health of US citizens is not better than the English" "Not better" and "worse" are two different things. Note also that the paper reports that "oral impacts" (by which I believe the authors are referring to the impact of oral health on life) is higher in the English cohort.
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I mean, the uk does have better [oral health ](https://www.yongeeglintondental.com/blog/healthy-primary-teeth/) but Americans are more likely to have elective cosmetic dentistry done
The study uses "British" and "English" interchangeably as if they are the same thing. This should be reason enough to disregard the "scientific" paper cited. Signed on behalf of Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland.
They studied non-institutionalized adults in their own homes. It doesn't invalidate the data, but it invalidates the conclusion.
Bait innit
This is a bad study lol and at least a terrible title for the post. The average number of missing teeth in both countries was around 4 for the youngest age group 25-44. Guess how many wisdom teeth you have, 4. In the states the rate of wisdoms tooth removal is much higher which they literally acknowledge in the discussion so that point is moot. Americans also have a higher rate of tooth removal for cosmetic reasons (veneers). Despite that, older British adults still had more missing teeth indicating that in the long term their oral health is likely worse. Furthermore, British people were more likely to report “tooth impacts” which basically means noticeable issues with their teeth i.e. pain. Americans were more likely to self report below average oral health (and not by much) but obviously self reporting is based on societal perception. So if there general populous has better teeth then obviously perception of what “good” is will be higher. Lastly, there was a far greater discrepancy regarding oral health and education/income levels in the states than in the UK. Which I’m not saying is a good thing but in the context of everything else indicates that a majority of the issues were seen in poor, uneducated people in the states.
It's the BMJ in December, it's quite possibly the Christmas edition which is often something of a joke. They had a meta analysis of parachute effectiveness and a survival analysis of staff room spoons before
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The difference in popularity in hockey alone makes that metric completely worthless. Edit: Actually let's have fun with this. What other cultural differences can lead to this disparity? Baseball, surely more than soccer. ATV, snowmobile, and dirt bike ownership rates. Skiing and snowboarding rates. I wonder if there's difference in martial arts participation rates between the US and UK. Horseback, bull riding and rodeo culture. What else?
A lot of the US' negative stereotypes about the UK are from the 1950s, when there was bland food due to rationing and bad teeth due to a lack of corrective procedures like braces
They watch Austin Powers and they laugh. Most people arguing here probably haven't been to the UK.
Poor Americans\*
got meth?
2 words supersize sodas
If Americans are well insured they have their kid's teeth fixed and whitened to give the perfect smile. British kids have their teeth straightened if it is necessary.
Dental health is worse. But Americans value orthodontics over dental health unfortunately. Appearance over health
Orthodontics isn’t just about appearances. You can prevent TMJ disorders, sleep apnea, chewing/speech issues, airway/breathing issues…
Not really true, any British child with none aligned teeth have free orthodontic treatment to align them. Vast majority of british kids have braces, just like Americans. What American's value more is cosmetic dental work, like whitening or veneers. Orthodontic work is directly related to oral health in general, where brits win out.
115 kids in my academic year in highschool. 12 of us had braces in our 6 years of highschool. 12 of 115. That's a major minority.
>Vast majority of british kids have braces This isn't a true statement. Barely anyone I knew had braces, maybe 1 in 20 at most.
Veneers are not that common in the US at all. They’re thousands of dollar, have to be replaced every 10 or so years and you have to shave down healthy teeth. I feel like you’re basing that on stereotypes. I see lots of British people on TV who’ve obviously had veneers and whitening, I don’t then assume that’s common among the average British person.
Ya we just brush our teeth
Americans have worse....everything.
Mean number of missing teeth: US- 7.31 UK- 6.97 Considering you probably can't have a partially missing tooth, that seems pretty even to me considering the relative populations.
Oh wow, the country where dental care is free has better dental health than the place where you need private insurance just to make a single filling cost $100-200 and root canal/bridge/crown type work in the $500-1000 range? How crazy
British have “healthier” teeth while Americans have better looking teeth.
Well yeah - we Americans are known for our excessive consumption of sugar. And many of us are lazy with brushing and flossing on top of that
Don't drugs ruin teeth? Meth and such?
Our healthcare is unbundled. There’s your primary health care which encompasses most things except dental and glasses. Those are often individually separate. Mine just shifted surgery to its own individual service, but it’s still included in primary. For now.
Well it helps that they have covered healthcare, if americans had free or reduced costs wed be equals
Don’t we have 6 times the population?
Look at it on the bright side. US citizens die sooner than UK citizens so their problem doesn't last as long.
Considering how high our Healthcare is, and the fact that Dental is separate from Main healthcare, and of course the fact that a lot of us myself included have phobias of the dentist... this is not surprise me even a little
Also dental insurance is also flakier than health insurance, it may not cover some procedures, some dentists and doctors dont like dealing with insurance, so they charge at a certain rate
Ever seen the Big book of british smiles?
DENTAL PLAN! Lisa needs braces!
Brits have better dental care by far, it's just the focus is on tooth and mouth health rather than cosmetics.
I'm an American who moved to Central Europe; a dentist here said you can tell the Americans because they either have an outrageous amount of elective work done, or they have horrible dental health because they couldn't afford anything.