I was not a fun driver for my friends. I always wore a seat belt and made them do it, too. I kicked people out of my car when they got unruly. I wouldn't stop to pick up third parties I didn't know (who might, after all, be holding drugs). I refused to play the music past the point where it distorted. I rarely sped more than eight miles over the speed limit (the magic number we shared amongst ourselves).

I still got in two solo accidents on ice and got a ticket for making a left turn during rush hour.

My friends who got too crazy also quit college and hold retail management jobs. My friends who didn't go too crazy went to grad school and live in Potomac.

Pregnant? Eat Chocolate!

When a woman gets pregnant, eating turns into a minefield. Swordfish for dinner? Nope, too much mercury. Blue cheese or feta on your salad? Sorry, soft cheeses can carry dangerous bacteria. A couple of glasses of wine with dinner? Forget about it.

But chocolate -- yes, chocolate -- appears to protect a pregnant woman from a serious complication of pregnancy known as preeclampsia. Preeclampsia is a common condition marked by high blood pressure and high levels of protein in the urine. It can be very dangerous -- even deadly -- for the mom and the baby.

The too-good-to-be-true news about chocolate comes from Elizabeth Triche of Yale University and her colleagues. The researchers studied 2,291 pregnant women who gave birth between 1996 and 2000. They asked the moms-to-be how much chocolate they ate in their first and second trimesters and tested blood from their umbilical cords for theobromine, a telltale component of chocolate.

Women who ate the most chocolate -- about a candy bar a day -- were about 70 percent less likely to develop preeclampsia than those who ate the least, the researchers report in this month's issue of the journal Epidemiology.

-- Rob Stein