A group of women watch surfers in the water at Jukdo beach in South Korea's northeast county of Yangyang during the annual Chuseok festival holiday on October 1, 2020. - Chuseok, which runs from October 1 to 3, is one of the two biggest festivals of the Korean year although authorities have urged the public to stay home to help contain the spread of the coronavirus. (AFP / Ed Jones)

Facebook posts circulate misleadingly claims that drinking alcohol makes women live longer

This article is more than one year old.
Published on March 18, 2021 at 05:00
2 min read
By Richard KANG, AFP South Korea

Multiple Facebook posts have shared a text screenshot alongside a claim that medical research has found women who drink alcohol live longer and have less chance of suffering from heart attack than those who do not. The claim omits important context: the text screenshot is actually a reference to medical research which surveyed only women who were hospitalised for a heart attack, not healthy women.

The claim was shared here on Facebook on March 9, 2021.

Screenshot of the misleading Facebook post, taken on March 15, 2021.

“This is why I drink, although I hate alcohol,” says the Korean-language claim.

The claim was shared alongside what appears to be a screenshot of a news report.

The Korean-language text in the screenshot translates to English as:

“Women who drink live longer and have a stronger heart.

“Did you know women who drink alcohol have a 35% less chance of suffering from a heart attack? In the past, the British newspaper Daily Mail introduced a novel research result that those with an acute myocardial infarction can reduce the risk of passing away by drinking steadily.”

An identical text screenshot and similar claims have been shared on Facebook here, here, here and here.

However, the claim omits important context. The referenced study in fact surveyed only women hospitalised for a heart attack and found drinking alcohol could be beneficial specifically for female survivors of a heart attack.

Keyword searches found the image is a screenshot taken from this blog post published by South Korean online newspaper Medipana on 25 November, 2011.

Below is a screenshot between the image in the misleading posts (L) and the report from Medipana (R):

Medipana’s post was written based on an article by the British newspaper Daily Mail titled “Drinking alcohol ‘improves your chances of surviving a heart attack’” that was published 28 October, 2011.

In that report, Daily Mail cited a study published by Harvard University Medical School, which surveyed more than 1,200 women who had been hospitalised for a heart attack.

Among those who already suffered from an acute myocardial infarction (MI), people who drank anything from a few alcoholic drinks a month to more than three a week in the year leading up to a heart attack ended up living longer than women who never drank alcohol, according to the study.

MI stands for myocardial infarction, which is the medical term for a heart attack.

“In conclusion, in women who survive MI, moderate drinking is associated with a decreased risk for mortality, with no clear differences on the basis of pattern or beverage type,” reads the study.

“These results suggest that women who survive MI need not abstain from alcohol, but any derived benefit would appear to occur well below currently recommended limits in alcohol consumption,” it adds.

Multiple organisations including the World Health Organisation warn about the dangers of excessive alcohol consumption, with some like the US Centers for Disease Control saying it is a particular risk to women's health.

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