A healthy social life is a happy life, as new U.S. research found that hanging out with friends and family reduces your risk of an early death by 50 percent.

A team from Brigham Young University found strong social relationships are just as beneficial to overall health as quitting smoking, losing weight or taking specific medications, Reuters reports.

"A lack of social relationships was equivalent to smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day," lead researcher and psychologist Julianne Holt-Lunstad, told Reuters.

Holt-Lunstad and her colleagues compiled data from 148 studies, which included more than 300,000 participants, in order to evaluate social relationships and how they affect overall health.

The authors of the study, which appears online in the Public Library of Science journal PLoS Medicine, say results suggest having low levels of social interaction was the same as suffering from alcoholism, was more detrimental than not exercising and twice as harmful as being obese.

Other comparisons the authors gave suggest that people's social lives are more important for their health than vaccines preventing pneumonia or drugs for hypertension.

"I certainly don't want to downplay these other risk factors because of course they are very important," Holt-Lunstad told Reuters. "We need to start taking social relationships just as seriously."

Dr. Daniel Carlat, AOL Health's mental health expert, says that from birth we are dependent on close relationships with others and our brains evolve to consistently need that interaction.

"We are social creatures biologically," Carlat tells AOL Health. "So it's no surprise that isolation is correlated with loneliness and a variety mental health problems."

The researchers told Reuters that it is difficult to study friendships and other relationships in a consistent system, as each study is structured differently, and it's impossible to set up a study where some participants have friends and other do not.

But Holt-Lundstad said they did find some evidence showing that assigned caretakers don't improve health.

"Naturally occurring relationships may be different than support received from someone who is hired for that purpose," she told Reuters.

The team found that although these social relationships have a significant impact on people's health, results show Americans are more isolated than ever before.

Carlat emphasizes that shyness and isolation are not the same thing.

"Many shy people may have a hard time making new friends but they have a few very close friends that provide good emotional support and camaraderie," he tells AOL Health.

Carlat says he encourages patients to have face-to-face interaction each day.

"I see more patients being isolated, in part because computer technology allows people to do productive work without interacting with other people," he tells AOL Health. "If someone finds themself in a work situation where they don't talk to a person for an entire day, that's not particularly healthy."