If you want to find the people with the best pearly whites, take a look at this list of the top 10 countries with the best and straightest teeth and oral health in the world.

Thanks to many many dentist visits as a child for my fair share of cavities, I can say I have some pretty healthy teeth. They’re also pretty straight thanks to expensive braces. However, my reality is not the reality for everyone in the world for a variety of reasons. Different diets and access to affordable dental care all play a big role in people’s dental health and hygiene. For example, some of the same countries on this list of 11 Countries with Free Health Care, will also be found on this list. For that matter they will likely overlap with those on this list of 11 Countries With the Best Healthcare In the World. If you haven’t figured it out already, access to affordable healthcare is important all across the world, no matter the size of a country. You can do all the brushing and flossing you want, but all teeth eventually have their problems.

Most countries with the worst oral hygiene and countries with the worst oral health, like Croatia, Guatemala, and Grenada, find themselves with those titles for reasons like unhealthy food habits, or lack of dental care (aka bad brushing habits), as well as the reasons mentioned above. On the other hand, a country like Japan with around 200,000 dental hygienists is regarded as one of the countries with the best dental hygiene in the world.

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The most acceptable measure of a large population’s oral health is the DMFT index. DMFT stands for decayed, missing, filled teeth. The DMFT index is widely used when assigning a numerical value to a population’s oral health and hygiene condition, and is determined by dentists examining a sample group from the population. Normally the sample group is of children ages 5 to 15, but sometimes adults are used as well. The dentists then count the number of decayed, missing or filled teeth for each individual on the day of the examination and then make an average for the entire population, therefore, they can assign a numeric value to a given large population group. The closer the value is to “0” the better. This process helps us to determine which country has the best teeth, for our list of top 10 countries with the best and straightest teeth and oral health in the world by taking into account tooth decay rates by country.

We basically looked at the DMFT index for all the countries in the world for the latest year, and then ranked the countries according to their DMFT score. As mentioned earlier, the lower the DMFT score, the better. The lower a country’s DMFT score, the higher it has been placed on the list. We used online resources, such as Country Oral Health Profiles, the WHO oral health information systemsand the World Oral Health Report 2003 published by the WHO. We also considered the overall healthcare budget for countries that made it into the list as well, and for that we used World Bank‘s database. The DMFT study we looked at today to come up with this ranking was done on kids aged 12. We must also note that our list looks at dental health rather than what country has the straightest teeth.

Let’s get started with our list of top 10 countries with the best and straightest teeth and oral health in the world.