Cultural Perspectives on Dental Health

Have you ever noticed how people from different countries, even those more developed, don’t have as great of dental health as Americans seem to?

I definitely have. And while it’s likely a bit of an exaggerated stereotype that Europeans have “worse” teeth than us, there’s something to be said about the crookedness of teeth you typically see in other cultures.

Now, I can’t speak on behalf of non-Americans, simply because it’s unfair to categorize so many people into one type, so this is definitely just my musings after watching a fair amount of British television lately. It’s more of an observation I’ve made rather than some sort of truth about anyone from England.

But what I’m getting at is that it seems that you’re more likely to see some slightly crooked teeth in other nations’ peoples than you are in America. And my guess would be that braces just aren’t as popular during teenage years in those countries.

To me, this makes me wonder about the need of braces. While extreme cases do warrant braces as not to cause issues with chewing food or teeth becoming unable to be cleaned, more minor cases that are still noticeable most likely just don’t need correcting.

If anything, this points out America’s obsession with perfection and looks. If braces aren’t usually needed, why do we still get them? Well, as a highly capitalist country, businesses are much more pushy on things you “need” when you probably don’t quite need them. And dentists are just as much business people as any other profession stateside.

So, braces have become a very common part of American culture in the past few decades. It’s quite normal, actually, for kids to have braces at some point in their lives to have straight teeth for the rest over their time. In fact, I would almost say it’s slightly abnormal for people to not have braces growing up, marking me as one of the unusual cases of the American youth.

Nonetheless, none of this is saying that braces are bad or malevolent by any means. It’s just that it makes sense that Americans are the most likely people to have braces because of the importance we place on how we look. And teeth are a big part of that, for us. We look at others’ teeth when evaluating them as a potential partner. Heck, we look at teeth when making snap judgments about people.

Overall, this all goes to show that there are reasons that cultures become the way they are. It’s not that other nations don’t care about their own teeth. They definitely do, but just in different ways.