Toothless tale

What chance have my teeth got? I'm English and vegetarian. We all know what the world, well Americans at least, think about the English and their bad teeth (I mean, gee, we didn't spend our childhoods with our heads strapped into huge grin-fixing braces, how disgusting), but now some ingenious Scottish scientists have deduced, from roasting ratatouille, that being vegetarian is bad for your teeth!

The conclusion is foolproof because, of course, all vegetarians eat is a diet of pure ratatouille (except for the occasional lasagne when they go out), and only a vegetarian would dream of roasting a ratatouille, as opposed to stewing it.

If you haven't bothered to click on the link and read the story, let me explain. Roasting ratatouille makes the vegetables more acidic than if you stew it. And acid is bad for your teeth. Therefore ... well, it's obvious isn't it?

Flawed as the research obviously is, it was a good enough story to make the pages of the Scotsman and the Daily Mail. Vegetarian scare-mongering is always good for a few column inches, get those half-hearted do-gooders a little jittery. Oh my god, my teeth! Well, I put myself, and my two brothers, also life-long vegetarians, forward as evidence (at least as good evidence as the Scottish scientists) that being veggie isn't bad for your teeth. One filling between us in about 90 years (combined ages). And never a chunck of meat chewed. So there.