Exercise and healthful eating are linked to better health—and so is having a decent circle of friends. Now it looks like that link between friends and better health is true for the major online social network, too: Facebook.

更好的健康不仅跟你的健康饮食与锻炼有关系，它甚至还需要你有一个还算过得去的朋友圈。在主要在线社交网络（如Facebook）中，你的朋友与更好的健康之间似乎有着联系。

Researchers compared the health records of 12 million Facebook users to non-users, in California. After controlling for things like age, race, and gender, they found that being on Facebook was associated with a slightly lower risk of death in a given year.

研究比较了1200万California Facebook用户与非用户的健康记录。控制了诸如年龄、人种、性别等变量，他们发现在特定的年份里，Facebook用户有着稍低的死亡风险。

Now, some of that could be explained by the fact that Facebook users might be more affluent, or have better access to healthcare. So the researchers did a second analysis—by looking only at Facebook and non-Facebook users on the California voter rolls, a sort of proxy control for socioeconomic status. And the association still held up. The study is in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. [William R. Hobbs et al., Online social integration is associated with reduced mortality risk]

现在有一些解释，Facebook用户也许会更富裕，或者是他们更好的关注自己健康的机会。因此这项研究开始了第二次分析，他们只寻找了California的Facebook用户与非Facebook用户的选民名单，这是一种控制社会经济情况的替代方法。并且协会仍然坚持。这篇报道来自于美国科学学报。

Of course correlation does not equal causation. Posting more photos isn't going to increase your lifespan. But the takeaway here is that, in some cases—like when people tag you in their photos—that online world can reflect real world ties. Interactions on Facebook are thus reflective of your actual human relationships—and might even reinforce them. Which certainly seems like a thumbs up.

当然相关并不等同于原因，贴出更多的照片并不能让你活得更长。但是关键的一点是在某些情况下——人们在他们的照片上贴上了标签——虚拟世界可以表现他与真实世界中的联系。在Facebook上的交互也因此可以反映出你真实的人际关系，甚至可以加强。那看起来就像是点了一个赞。

—Christopher Intagliata