Sparkling white teeth may be the norm for TV and advertisements, but these top 10 countries with the worst teeth, oral health and hygiene in the world, will show you a different side of things.
Oral health is important for a number of reasons, but we pretty much all want to have pearly whites. Unfortunately, not everyone has access to oral health and hygiene and even if they do, it can be really expensive. For example, having to fill a cavity can be between $50 and $150 just for one tooth without insurance. Having insurance helps, but you still have to pay something. Just by the looks of it, it seems teeth and oral hygiene changes depending on where you go in the world. While teeth may not be perfectly straight and white, that doesn’t necessarily mean they are not healthy. Because oral health habits change in different locations, many people wonder which country has the best teeth? The answer depends on the criteria you’re comparing, but many argue that the Japan has the best teeth as far as health goes because the country has nearly 200,000 dental hygienists. Because Japan is so small, they likely have the best dental hygiene in the world. We dig deeper into the best dental health in the world in our list of Top 10 Countries With the Best and Straightest Teeth and Oral Health in the World.
As far as which country has the straightest teeth, you can bet that developed countries with more access to orthodontists will rank high on that list. Healthcare also plays a huge role into this because straightening teeth can cost as much or more than keeping them healthy. It’s better to have healthy teeth than straight ones. When it comes to teeth, the problems don’t discriminate based on race, age, sex, or socio-economic status. No one is immune from teeth problems. According to the World Health Organization, around the world, 60-90% of children have cavities while nearly 100% of adults have them.
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Now that you’re a little closer to find out what country has the worst teeth in the world, we’ll tell you how we came up with our list of countries with the worst teeth, oral health and hygiene in the world. Well, perhaps the most common way of measuring the oral health condition of a large group of people (such as a country) is DMFT index. DMFT Stands for Decayed, Missing, Filled Teeth at the time of a dental examination. Finding the tooth decay rates by country was the best way for us to determine which countries have the worst teeth. The score for each criterion is summed up and an average is calculated for the entire population sample. So basically the DMFT score gives us, on average, how many tooth problems an individual suffers from the given population. The higher the DMFT score, the worse the condition of oral health and hygiene. DMFT is often calculated for children ages 5 to 15, and the DMFT index we used as a basis for our research was done on 12-year-olds. If you are interested in learning more about DMFT and how it is calculated, then you will find ample information on Malmö University’s website, a renowned university in Malmö, Sweden.
For this list of countries with the worst teeth, oral health and hygiene in the world we sought help from various websites, most notably, Country Oral Health Profiles, WHO oral health information systems and World Oral Health Report 2003 also published by the WHO. We basically looked at the DMFT index and found the countries with high DMFT ratings for the latest year for which the data was available. Then we went ahead and ranked them based on the DMFT score. As mentioned before, the higher the DMFT score, the higher a country has been placed in the list.
In this case, having a higher DMFT score is not a good thing however, as we are talking about top 10 countries with the worst teeth, oral health and hygiene in the world.
