Italy's Emma Morano turned 117 on Tuesday, November 29.

Born in 1899, she is the oldest person in the world and one of just a handful to have lived through three centuries.

A key to her longevity, she tells the New York Times, is being single. After a troubled marriage, Morano kicked her husband out in 1938, a time when separation was rare and divorce illegal.

"I didn't want to be dominated by anyone," Morano tells the Times. She never remarried despite having "plenty of suitors."

Of course, there's more to Morano's staying power than her independence. She also credits her longevity to genetics (her mother lived to be 91, and several of her seven siblings lived to see 100, BBC reports) and to an unconventional diet.

She's been eating three eggs a day — two of them raw — for more than 90 years. That's about 100,000 eggs over her lifetime.

Recently, Morano has reduced her daily egg intake to two, both taken raw. (No word on whether she enjoys them with soy sauce, like Twitter's Jack Dorsey .) She supplements those over the course of an average day with ground meat, pasta and cookies.

"Emma has always eaten very few vegetables, very little fruit," her doctor Carlo Bava tells AFP. Yet, despite her aversion to fresh produce, she's seemingly "eternal," Bava says.