There's all sorts of things you can do to improve your health these days. Add some kale or turmeric or green tea to your diet, take a sauna or maybe fast for most of the day. There's a myriad of products and supplements with wild promises. But it turns out, the old standbys really do stand up. Researchers at Harvard University have assembled a simple set of habits that have been proven to add more than a decade to your life. They're not groundbreaking. You shouldn't smoke, you should have a healthy BMI, be active, maintain a balanced diet and avoid overindulging in alcohol. Everything Mom probably warned you about.

The new findings, published in the journal Circulation, indicate that men who adhere to all five behaviors will live roughly 12 years longer than those who don't follow any of them. (Women who met the same criteria were found to live an additional 14 years.) What's more, these easy healthy habits also dramatically decrease your risk of dying from cardiovascular disease and cancer—the two leading causes of death in the United States.

The research combined data from two larger studies of more than 123,000 people, and while the news isn't exactly surprising (healthy living leads to a longer life), the researchers were quite shocked by just how much longer people lived when they adhered to cleaner living.

"We can do so much better for having a long healthy life by pretty simple minimal changes in our behavior, and only 8% of adults in our country are adhering to these," study co-author Dr. Meir Stampfer or Harvard Medical School told CNN. "The main take-home message is that there's huge gains in health and longevity to be had just by simple changes in our behavior pattern, and as a country, I think we need to make it easier for ourselves to do this by promoting tobacco cessation, by providing better environments for physical activity and so on."