Tuesday, May 13, 2008

What Are They Thinking?

In a study published in the May issue of Pediatrics, 5,665 kids in grades 10 through 12 were asked to rate the riskiness of such behaviors as drinking, having unruly passengers, using cellphones and text messaging, and speeding, all of which we grown-ups know can pose grave risks to all drivers, including teens. The kids also were asked how often they had witnessed such behaviors.

While many of the respondents ranked lack of experience as a middling risk factor, they overwhelmingly reported that they'd rarely seen a teen driver who was inexperienced. The researchers note that teens likely equate "experience" with the mere fact of having acquired a license.

According to the teens, talking on a cellphone while driving wasn't all that risky, but text messaging was extremely risky, ranking right up there with racing.

Having adolescent passengers barely registered as risky, but when those passengers start "acting wild," they become very risky indeed.

Nearly all the teens surveyed recognized drinking and driving as a very high-risk proposition, but very few reported having seen anyone drink and drive.

-- Jennifer Huget

DCer wrote:

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

Yummy wrote:

When I was pregnant I craved two things: chocolate and citrus. I figured the two balanced each other out. Didn't know I was doing double good for myself and my baby!

Worth a Laugh

It turns out Maryland is kind of a hotbed of laughter-and-health research: Michael Miller, a cardiologist at the University of Maryland Medical Center, has done research showing that laughter may have beneficial cardiovascular effects, just as stress has been shown to adversely affect cardiovascular health.

And Richard Provine, a psychologist at the University of Maryland Baltimore County, has established himself as an expert on the psychological benefits of yukking it up. He published his laughter-related research in 2000 in "Laughter: A Scientific Investigation." Provine sees laughter as "a sign that things are going well in your life." "It's a misperception that most laughter is in response to jokes. Laughter is social," he tells me. "It disappears in solitary people. If you're laughing, there are other people in your life."

-- Jennifer Huget