By: Caroline Maas, staff writer

I think you can tell a lot about a person by the way that take their coffee.

There are the simple cream and sugar people, the iced coffee fanatics, the Latte folks, the Macchiato mystics, and the single shot of espresso humans. There are the Frappuccino indulgers and the Cold Brew hippies, the Pour-Over pioneers and the independent French Press peeps. And of course, there is the black coffee community.

If I’m being honest, the black coffee community is one that I had never imagined myself claiming membership to. Black coffee doesn’t match my personality and the fact that black coffee contains exactly no sugar doesn’t bode well with my philosophy about how we should decorate our lives. But here I am, 20 and changed, obviously made exponentially more mature and cultured simply by the fact that I drink black coffee (I hope you picked up on how densely saturated with sarcasm that sentence is).

Apart from the credibility that accompanies the ability to say you belong to the Black Coffee Community, what are the benefits to converting to this uncomfortably stark tasting genre of coffee, you may ask?

Well, to start, an eight-ounce cup of coffee contains just two calories and a mere zero grams of fat.

Black coffee has also been proven to improve physical improvement during workout sessions. Black coffee also increases epinephrine or adrenaline levels in the blood, preparing the body for physical exertion.

There is also scientific evidence proving that drinking black coffee may lower your risk of Type II diabetes, Alzheimer’s Disease, and Dementia.

So essentially, black coffee is the lifeblood of America and we should drink more of it.