The world's oldest woman has revealed the food that will see her crack 117 years on November 27.
Emma Morano, 116, from Verbania in northern Italy, eats two or three eggs a day and has done so since she was 20 - making her total egg consumption more than 100,000.
Morano began eating eggs daily after a doctor diagnosed her with anemia when she was 20, and told her to include two raw eggs and a cooked one in her daily diet.
These days she's cut down to two eggs a day.
"And that’s it," she tells Agence-France Press. "And cookies. But I do not eat much because I have no teeth."
Morano's doctor, Carlo Bava, says she has never followed conventional nutritional guidelines.
"Emma has always eaten very few vegetables, very little fruit," he says.
"When I met her, she ate three eggs per day, two in the morning and then an omelette at noon, and chicken at dinner."
Now, according to Bava, Morano doesn't eat much meat "because she doesn't like it anymore and someone told her it causes cancer".
And she is unlikely to eat any of her birthday cake: "The last time I ate a little, but then I did not feel good," she says.
Morano became the world's oldest living person in May after the death of the former titleholder Susannah Mushatt Jones.
She is still a few birthdays shy of the record for the oldest ever living person, held by French woman Jeanne Calment, who lived to 122.
Morano has maintained her independence, and has lived alone since leaving her violent husband in 1938, shortly after the death in infancy of her only son.
She only took on a full-time caregiver last year, but has not left her two-room apartment in 20 years.
Despite not having any immediate family, Morano does not expect to celebrate her 117th birthday alone.
"People come. I don’t invite anybody but they come. From America, Switzerland, Austria, Turin, Milan… They come from all over to see me," she tells Agence-France Press.
