Morano, world’s oldest person, is egg fanatic
verbania — In one month it will be Emma Morano’s birthday. Though she hasn’t invited anyone, people from around the world are still likely to turn up to celebrate with the last known person alive to have been born in the 19th century.
“I’m 116 years and on 27 November, I’ll be 117,” this alert and chatty lady tells in her room in Verbania, a town in northern Italy on Lake Maggiore.
On a marble-topped chest of drawers stands proudly the Guinness World Records certificate declaring Morano, born in 1899, to be the world’s oldest living person. There is also a photograph of her and her doctor Carlo Bava holding eggs: the secret to her long life appears to lie in eschewing all received medical wisdom. “I eat two eggs a day, and that’s it. And cookies. But I do not eat much because I have no teeth,” she says. The egg habit dates from when she was diagnosed with anaemia at 20 in the wake of World War I and a doctor advised her to eat three a day, two raw and one cooked. She maintained that regime for 90 years and is believed to have eaten over 100,000 eggs and counting.
“Emma has always eaten very few vegetables, very little fruit. When I met her, she ate three eggs per day, two raw in the morning and then an omelette at noon, and chicken at dinner,” said Bava, who has been her doctor for the past 27 years. Now she lives mostly on biscuits “and does not want to eat meat because she doesn’t like it anymore and someone told her it causes cancer,” he said.
Morano is not even sure she’ll have a slice of her birthday cake, saying “the last time I ate a little, but then I did not feel good”.
She may still be some way off the previous record, held by France’s Jeanne Calment who lived to be 122, but Morano, the eldest of eight children who has outlived all her younger siblings, knows turning 117 will be an event to celebrate.
“People come. I don’t invite anybody but they come. From America, Switzerland, Austria, Turin, Milan.. —
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