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Recipe for Longevity: No Smoking, Lots of Friends

from Time

A healthy social life may be as good for your long-term health as avoiding cigarettes, according to a massive research review released Tuesday by the journal PLoS Medicine.

Researchers at Brigham Young University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill pooled data from 148 studies on health outcomes and social relationships--every research paper on the topic they could find, involving more than 300,000 men and women across the developed world--and found that those with poor social connections had on average 50% higher odds of death in the study's follow-up period (an average of 7.5 years) than people with more robust social ties.

That boost in longevity is about as large as the mortality difference observed between smokers and nonsmokers, the study's authors say. And it's larger than differences in the risk of death associated with many other well-known lifestyle factors, including lack of exercise and obesity.