The World’s Oldest Living Woman Is All About Raw Eggs, Raw Meat And Brushing Off Dudes

Gotta love the internet’s fascination with what really, really old people do that enables them to live past the 100 year mark — especially when said old people divulge secrets that are strange and sometimes unhealthy. But 116-year-old Emma Morano’s tips for longevity are downright badass. She just became the Guinness Book of World Records’ oldest living woman in the world, and she did it by eating raw eggs, raw meat, and staying single.

Hoda Kotb and Kathie Lee Gifford recently discussed Morano’s extraordinary life on the Today Show. She was born in 1899 and has lived through “two turn-of-the-centuries.” She left an abusive marriage in the 1930s, at a time when women didn’t do something like that, and then she brushed off subsequent suitors. She lives alone, but has a caretaker and two nieces who visit her every day.

But why the raw diet (which will now be copied by health freaks in New York and LA and everywhere else)? She eats two raw eggs and 100 grams of raw steak every day in order to combat anemia. According to a New York Times article from last year, Morano has been eating these raw eggs since she was a teenager. She also moved to her current home of Verbania when she was younger, because the “pretty lakeshore town” was better for her constitution. As for that unhappy marriage, Morano left shortly after the death of an infant son, and never remarried because, “I didn’t want to be dominated by anyone.”

Morano became the world’s oldest woman last Friday after the previous record-holder, Susannah Mushatt Jones, died. Jones’ secret? Eating bacon every day.

(via Today Show and New York Times)