WASHINGTON - President Barack Obama challenged the nation’s vested interests to a legislative duel Saturday, saying he will fight to change health care, energy and education in dramatic ways that will upset the status quo.

“The system we have now might work for the powerful and well-connected interests that have run Washington for far too long,” Obama said in his weekly radio and video address. “But I don’t. I work for the American people.”

He said his ambitious budget plan, unveiled Thursday, will help millions of Americans, but only if Congress overcomes resistance from deep-pocket lobbies.

“I know these steps won’t sit well with the special interests and lobbyists who are invested in the old way of doing business, and I know they’re gearing up for a fight,” Obama said, using tough-guy language reminiscent of his predecessor, George W. Bush. “My message to them is this: So am I.”

Some analysts say Obama’s proposals are almost radical. But he said all of them were included in his campaign promises. “It is the change the American people voted for in November,” he said.

Nonetheless, he said, well-financed interest groups will fight back furiously.

Insurance companies will dislike having “to bid competitively to continue offering Medicare coverage, but that’s how we’ll help preserve and protect Medicare and lower health care costs,” the president said. “I know that banks and big student lenders won’t like the idea that we’re ending their huge taxpayer subsidies, but that’s how we’ll save taxpayers nearly $50 billion and make college more affordable. I know that oil and gas companies won’t like us ending nearly $30 billion in tax breaks, but that’s how we’ll help fund a renewable energy economy.”

Passing the budget, even with a Democratic-controlled Congress, “won’t be easy,” Obama said. “Because it represents real and dramatic change, it also represents a threat to the status quo in Washington.”

Congressional Republicans continued to bash Obama’s spending proposals and his projection of a $1.75 trillion deficit this year.

Almost every day brings another “multibillion-dollar government spending plan being proposed or even worse, passed,” said Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C., who gave the GOP’s weekly address.

He said Obama is pushing “the single largest increase in federal spending in the history of the United States, while driving the deficit to levels that were once thought impossible.”

WASHINGTON - Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton is using her second overseas trip as the nation’s top diplomat to assess peace prospects in the Middle East, reconnect with European allies and remind her Russian counterpart that U.S. efforts to rebuild relations with Moscow has its limits.

The former first lady and former U.S. senator from New York is kicking off a weeklong journey by attending an international conference in Egypt where she will announce on Monday a U.S. government pledge of up to $900 million in humanitarian assistance for the rebuilding of the war-shaken Gaza Strip.

The Palestinians are seeking $2.8 billion dollars for Gaza. A key complication is that the United States does not recognize the Hamas movement that rules Gaza and will not allow aid money to flow through Hamas.

The pledge conference for Gaza reflects in part a U.S. effort to move quickly to influence events there, where the Islamic militants of Hamas are aligned with Iran and opposed to peace talks with Israel. Hamas is at odds with the other key Palestinian faction, Fatah, which takes a more moderate approach to Israel.

Clinton also will visit Israel to underscore President Barack Obama’s commitment to finding a “two-state solution” to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that establishes a sovereign Palestinian state at peace with Israel.

After its elections Feb. 10, Israel is operating under a caretaker government. The hawkish Benjamin Netanyahu is attempting to form a coalition government but the timing and outcome are in doubt.

Among leaders Clinton would be expected to visit in Israel are Netanyahu and Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, leader of the centrist Kadima Party, which won one more seat in the election than Netanyahu’s Likud. Netanyahu, who opposes moving forward in peace talks with the Palestinians, was asked to put together the next government because he has the support of a majority of the elected lawmakers.

Clinton also will venture into the West Bank to meet with leaders of the Palestinian Authority, including Prime Minister Salam Fayyad and President Mahmoud Abbas.

After focusing her first foreign trip on the Pacific Rim of Asia, Clinton is going to the Middle East and to Europe to try to build on what the Obama administration believes is early enthusiasm in those regions for changing the dynamic of relations with America after years of disconnect on many key issues.

Daniel Fried, the assistant secretary of state for European affairs, said Friday the main theme of Clinton’s visit to Brussels, Belgium, on Thursday will be “the reconnection of the United States to Europe and a sense of consolidating some of the enormous political goodwill on both sides of the Atlantic, and harnessing it to a common agenda - not an American agenda but a common trans-Atlantic agenda.”

On Friday, Clinton is scheduled to meet in Geneva with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, who had a sometimes rocky relationship with Clinton’s predecessor, Condoleezza Rice, a Russian affairs specialist.

Lavrov was quoted by Russian news agencies on Friday as saying he expected the Geneva meeting to focus on arms control. That was an issue of great frustration for the Russians during the administration of former President George W. Bush, which abandoned the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty early in his first term in order to accelerate the development of a missile defense opposed by Moscow.

Clinton has said the Obama administration is willing to move ahead quickly on a replacement for the START arms treaty that is due to expire in December, and to consider deeper cuts in nuclear weapons.

Fried said that although the Obama administration is interested in improving relations with Russia, Lavrov will be reminded that the U.S. does not accept the Russian argument that it has a sphere of influence in Central Asia and Eastern Europe that gives Moscow special say on issues like missile defense.

The Obama administration’s interest in engaging Russia is tempered by “cautionary notes,” Fried said. That includes a concern that Moscow has gone too far in flexing its muscles in places like the former Soviet republic of Georgia, where Russian troops fought a brief war last summer, and in opposing the NATO membership aspirations of countries like Ukraine, which also is a former Soviet republic on Russia’s border.

“The most productive way (to move forward with Russia) is to do so building on areas where we have common interests, but also mindful of our differences - not shying away from them, nor abandoning our values and our friends,” Fried said. “That makes for a complicated relationship with Russia.”

Clinton is scheduled to wind up her trip with a stop in Ankara, Turkey, to discuss a range of topics with senior Turkish government officials, including the Obama review of its strategy for the war in Afghanistan. The Turks think the U.S. should put more focus on expanding and improving the Afghan security forces and on pressing Afghan authorities to reconcile with elements of the Islamic insurgency, rather than on putting tens of thousands more U.S. troops.

WASHINGTON - Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton is using her second overseas trip as the nation’s top diplomat to assess peace prospects in the Middle East, reconnect with European allies and remind her Russian counterpart that U.S. efforts to rebuild relations with Moscow has its limits.

The former first lady and former U.S. senator from New York is kicking off a weeklong journey by attending an international conference in Egypt where she will announce on Monday a U.S. government pledge of up to $900 million in humanitarian assistance for the rebuilding of the war-shaken Gaza Strip.

The Palestinians are seeking $2.8 billion dollars for Gaza. A key complication is that the United States does not recognize the Hamas movement that rules Gaza and will not allow aid money to flow through Hamas.

The pledge conference for Gaza reflects in part a U.S. effort to move quickly to influence events there, where the Islamic militants of Hamas are aligned with Iran and opposed to peace talks with Israel. Hamas is at odds with the other key Palestinian faction, Fatah, which takes a more moderate approach to Israel.

Clinton also will visit Israel to underscore President Barack Obama’s commitment to finding a “two-state solution” to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that establishes a sovereign Palestinian state at peace with Israel.

After its elections Feb. 10, Israel is operating under a caretaker government. The hawkish Benjamin Netanyahu is attempting to form a coalition government but the timing and outcome are in doubt.

Among leaders Clinton would be expected to visit in Israel are Netanyahu and Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, leader of the centrist Kadima Party, which won one more seat in the election than Netanyahu’s Likud. Netanyahu, who opposes moving forward in peace talks with the Palestinians, was asked to put together the next government because he has the support of a majority of the elected lawmakers.

Clinton also will venture into the West Bank to meet with leaders of the Palestinian Authority, including Prime Minister Salam Fayyad and President Mahmoud Abbas.

After focusing her first foreign trip on the Pacific Rim of Asia, Clinton is going to the Middle East and to Europe to try to build on what the Obama administration believes is early enthusiasm in those regions for changing the dynamic of relations with America after years of disconnect on many key issues.

Daniel Fried, the assistant secretary of state for European affairs, said Friday the main theme of Clinton’s visit to Brussels, Belgium, on Thursday will be “the reconnection of the United States to Europe and a sense of consolidating some of the enormous political goodwill on both sides of the Atlantic, and harnessing it to a common agenda - not an American agenda but a common trans-Atlantic agenda.”

On Friday, Clinton is scheduled to meet in Geneva with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, who had a sometimes rocky relationship with Clinton’s predecessor, Condoleezza Rice, a Russian affairs specialist.

Lavrov was quoted by Russian news agencies on Friday as saying he expected the Geneva meeting to focus on arms control. That was an issue of great frustration for the Russians during the administration of former President George W. Bush, which abandoned the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty early in his first term in order to accelerate the development of a missile defense opposed by Moscow.

Clinton has said the Obama administration is willing to move ahead quickly on a replacement for the START arms treaty that is due to expire in December, and to consider deeper cuts in nuclear weapons.

Fried said that although the Obama administration is interested in improving relations with Russia, Lavrov will be reminded that the U.S. does not accept the Russian argument that it has a sphere of influence in Central Asia and Eastern Europe that gives Moscow special say on issues like missile defense.

The Obama administration’s interest in engaging Russia is tempered by “cautionary notes,” Fried said. That includes a concern that Moscow has gone too far in flexing its muscles in places like the former Soviet republic of Georgia, where Russian troops fought a brief war last summer, and in opposing the NATO membership aspirations of countries like Ukraine, which also is a former Soviet republic on Russia’s border.

“The most productive way (to move forward with Russia) is to do so building on areas where we have common interests, but also mindful of our differences - not shying away from them, nor abandoning our values and our friends,” Fried said. “That makes for a complicated relationship with Russia.”

Clinton is scheduled to wind up her trip with a stop in Ankara, Turkey, to discuss a range of topics with senior Turkish government officials, including the Obama review of its strategy for the war in Afghanistan. The Turks think the U.S. should put more focus on expanding and improving the Afghan security forces and on pressing Afghan authorities to reconcile with elements of the Islamic insurgency, rather than on putting tens of thousands more U.S. troops.

WASHINGTON - President Barack Obama leaned heavily toward field commanders’ preferences in settling a time frame for ending the war in Iraq, as he weighed the fervent desires of the anti-war community that propelled him into office and the equally strong worries of the generals commanding troops in the war zone.

“To this very day, there are some Americans who want to stay in Iraq longer, and some who want to leave faster,” Obama said in making the announcement Friday, summing up a debate that has divided the country like no other since the former President George W. Bush launched the U.S. invasion six years ago.

Obama’s description suggests he arrived at a split-down-the-middle compromise with one of the first and most important tasks of his young presidency.

But accounts of the process from officials in the White House, at the Pentagon and across the administration, who all requested anonymity so they could speak more candidly about behind-the-scenes discussions, show otherwise.

At stake was the promise that most defined and drove Obama’s successful presidential bid: to bring all combat troops home - effectively, to end the war - 16 months after taking office. The details he unveiled in an appearance Friday before hundreds of Marines at Camp Lejeune, N.C., depart from that pledge in several ways:

_The combat withdrawal will take three months longer than he promised. It is now be to completed by the end of August 2010, 19 months after Obama’s inauguration. Though what Obama emphasized most as a candidate was his determination to bring about a quick end to the war, in the fine print of almost all his statements was a twin commitment to flexibility. One administration official said Obama was never wedded to the timeline encased in his overall public pledge.

_The withdrawal will not happen at an even pace of one combat brigade per month, as he had repeatedly said. Instead, it will be backloaded, so that the force posture for this year and into the first few months of 2010 likely will be essentially the same as it would have been under Bush. Under Obama’s plan, troops will start leaving in large numbers probably only next spring or summer, though the president intends to leave the pacing decisions up to field commanders.

_Even after the combat drawdown, a very large force of as many as 50,000 troops will remain - an element of the withdrawal strategy that has caused heartache among anti-war Democrats who wanted a fuller pullout.

This residual force will have a new mission, of training Iraqis, protecting U.S. assets and personnel, and conducting anti-terror operations. While those are technically noncombat tasks, the soldiers and Marines will remain in harm’s way and engage at times in some form of fighting.

Understanding how Obama, his aides and his generals came to this plan must start with how the candidate arrived at his campaign promise.

Indeed, in the words of one administration official, there was never any magic to the 16-months time frame. At the time Obama first made the pledge, there were around 16 combat brigades in Iraq, and military experts told the candidate that Iraq was too fragile for a drawdown much faster than one combat brigade per month.

As early as last July, Obama gave the military leadership a strong signal that they could influence his thinking.

During a trip to Baghdad, Obama privately assured Gen. David Petraeus - then the top U.S. commander there - that although he favored a 16-month pullout, he would do nothing rash if elected to endanger security gains in Iraq, according to a U.S. official familiar with their meeting.

When he won, Obama and his team began meeting on the issue right away.

But the process didn’t really begin until he held the reins of the presidency.

On Day One, Obama directed the Defense Department to start the planning for “a responsible military drawdown.” Also that first week, he gathered top national security advisers in the Situation Room, with commanders participating in person and from the field via secure videoconference. A week later, he made his first trip to the Pentagon, to see the chairman and the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and all four uniformed service chiefs.

Multiple discussions with field commanders followed, as well as with Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Gates and Mullen presented Obama with three withdrawal options: one following his 16-month promise, one for a 19-month phase-out and another that stretched it over 23 months.

A dozen working groups were convened and 10 interagency meetings were held, said two White House officials. Another administration official said that while it was understood that the final decision resided in the West Wing, it was also clear to those outside the White House that they were being heard, with a lot of back-and-forth and draft-sharing.

The pivotal day was last Saturday, at an all-day National Security Council meeting. Three days later, Obama met with Gates at the White House, and met again on Wednesday with Mullen there with them. It was then that Obama formally accepted the 19-month option.

Obama officials insist that the potential political fallout played no role.

One reason was that presidential advisers calculated that whatever option Obama chose, even the most passionate in the anti-war camp would most remember that he ended the war - not when. Also, Obama entered office with the decision having been made much easier for him by none other than Bush, who struck a last-minute agreement with Iraqis requiring all U.S. troops, combat or otherwise, to be gone by December 2011.

So at most, Obama was talking about speeding up some parts of that by a year and a half.

But that doesn’t mean the president didn’t face competing advice.

The service chiefs see Iraq as a drain on their resources and a strain on their personnel and their families.

Top Marine commanders, for instance, preferred to concentrate their relatively small footprint on the new urgency in Afghanistan.

Gen. David McKiernan, the top U.S. commander there, has said that he needs not only additional combat troops but also surveillance aircraft and more civilian support. Obama’s national security adviser, retired Marine Gen. James Jones, was already on record as supporting redirecting resources to Afghanistan.

Meanwhile, Iraqi officials and some commanders, such as Gen. Ray Odierno, Petraeus’ successor as the top U.S. general in Iraq, and outgoing Ambassador Ryan Crocker, pushed for the 23-month withdrawal plan. The two worried about keeping Iraq’s modest momentum toward political reconciliation on track, particularly in light of the parliamentary elections set to be held in December. They didn’t want to lose more than two of the 14 combat brigades now in Iraq before the end of this year.

Petraeus, now Odierno’s boss as head of U.S. Central Command, is said to have leaned this way, too.

Odierno also wanted a backloaded withdrawal, and one without a rigid schedule in any case, because of the unpredictability of the situation around the elections. Gates said Friday that he and Mullen backed that approach.

“The president found that very compelling,” said one of the White House officials.

In the end, that drove the strategy.

Gates said it would have been too much of a crunch to leave so many forces in place for the national elections and still meet Obama’s original deadline of an exit by May.

So with the December elections as a starting point, the team added a two-month buffer requested by Odierno. The rest was logistics: how long would it take starting in February to get all the rest of the combat troops out safely? They settled on six months.

As Obama said on Friday: “We have forged hard-earned progress, we are leaving Iraq to its people, and we have begun the work of ending this war.”

WASHINGTON (AFP) - Eating heart-healthy, low-calorie foods and exercising is the key to losing weight regardless of levels of protein, fat or carbohydrates, a new study has found.

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[AFP/File/Frederic J. Brown] Overweight patients cast a shadow at a weight reduction clinic. A new study has found that eating heart-healthy, low-calorie foods and exercising is the key to losing weight regardless of levels of protein, fat or carbohydrates.(AFP/File/Frederic J. Brown)

The research, funded by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) of the National Institutes of Health, seems to argue against blanket use of diets that do not necessarily limit calories but call for eating certain foods such as vegetables or proteins, at the expense of others.

The NIH study of 811 volunteers, 38 percent of them men and 62 percent women, aged 30-70 and either overweight or obese, looked at diets that have been popular in the United States in recent years, even as the number of obese Americans has soared.

The “Preventing Overweight Using Novel Dietary Strategies (POUNDS LOST) study found similar weight loss after six months and two years among participants assigned to four diets that differed in their proportions of these three major nutrients,” said researchers.

“The diets were low or high in total fat (20 or 40 percent of calories) with average or high protein (15 or 25 percent of calories). Carbohydrate content ranged from 35 to 65 percent of calories.

“The diets all used the same calorie reduction goals and were heart-healthy low in saturated fat and cholesterol while high in dietary fibre,” said researchers, whose study is published Thursday in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Participants lost an average 13 pounds (5.9 kilos) at six months and maintained a nine-pound (four-kilo) loss at two years.

“These results show that, as long as people follow a heart-healthy, reduced-calorie diet, there is more than one nutritional approach to achieving and maintaining a healthy weight,” said Dr. Elizabeth Nabel, director at NHLBI.

“This provides people who need to lose weight with the flexibility to choose an approach that they’re most likely to sustain: one that is most suited to their personal preferences and health needs,” she stressed.

Sixty-six percent of US adults are overweight and of those, 32 percent are obese, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data show.

FRIDAY, Feb. 27 (HealthDay News) — You might look like you’re not paying attention when you doodle, but science says otherwise.

Researchers in the United Kingdom found that test subjects who doodled while listening to a recorded message had a 29 percent better recall of the message’s details than those who didn’t doodle. The findings were published in Applied Cognitive Psychology.

“If someone is doing a boring task, like listening to a dull telephone conversation, they may start to daydream,” study researcher Professor Jackie Andrade, of the School of Psychology at the University of Plymouth, said in a news release issued by the journal’s publisher. “Daydreaming distracts them from the task, resulting in poorer performance. A simple task, like doodling, may be sufficient to stop daydreaming without affecting performance on the main task.”

For the experiment, a two-and-a-half minute listing of several people’s names and places was played for test subjects, who were charged with writing down only the names of the people said to be attending a party. During the recording, half the participants were asked to simultaneously shade in shapes on a piece of paper without attention to neatness. Participants were not told they were taking part in a memory test.

When the recording ended, all were asked for the eight names of those attending the party as well as eight place names mentioned in the audio. Those asked to doodle wrote down, on average, 7.5 names and places, while those who didn’t doodle listed only 5.8.

“In psychology, tests of memory or attention will often use a second task to selectively block a particular mental process,” Andrade said. “If that process is important for the main cognitive task, then performance will be impaired. My research shows that beneficial effects of secondary tasks, such as doodling, on concentration may offset the effects of selective blockade.”

In everyday life, Andrade said, doodling “may be something we do because it helps to keep us on track with a boring task, rather than being an unnecessary distraction that we should try to resist doing.”

SANTA MONICA, Calif. - Staff at the Santa Monica Pier Aquarium in California say the trickster who flooded their offices with sea water was armed. Eight-armed, to be exact.

They blame the soaking they discovered Tuesday morning on the aquarium’s resident two-spotted octopus, a tiny female known for being curious and gregarious with visitors. The octopus apparently tugged on a valve and that allowed hundreds of gallons of water to overflow its tank.

Aquarium spokeswoman Randi Parent says no sea life was harmed by the flood, but the brand new, ecologically designed floors might be damaged by the water.

* 1 rod and line

* 90 minutes for one British biologist (with help) to reel in the freshwater fish

* 13 men to drag said fish onto a boat

* 125 pounds-that’s the difference between the stingray’s weight at 771 pounds and the previous record rod-&-reel capture of a catfish

The Thailand capture of the massive female stingray was part of a program to tag such Maeklong River residents. The captive, part of a “vulnerable species” listed by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, measured a hefty 7 feet by 7 feet. That doesn’t include the 10-foot-long poisonous tail.

Such creatures are dangerous, of course: Famed Australian TV personality Steve “Crocodile Hunter” Irwin died from a stingray barb at the Great Barrier Reef in 2006.

The numbers currently put one Ian Welch on the world record books. (Pictures of Welch posing with his female companion can be found here.) The stingray’s resistance nearly dunked Welch into the river, and he was literally saved by the seat of his pants when a crewmate grabbed his trousers.

Another reason that this marine fish is so huge: She’s pregnant. (Cue soap-opera gasp.) After she had been towed to the bank (too big to be onboard the boat), she was duly marked, had DNA samples removed, and returned to the river whence she unwillingly came. Welch gave her a farewell smooch, then spent the rest of the day with a cold beer and memories of her.

By the way, one number isn’t known: the exact stingray population count, which has shrunk 20 percent in the past decade. With this lady’s help, at least one more will be added to this number…and with a tale to tell.

LOS ANGELES - Low-fat, low-carb or high-protein? The kind of diet doesn’t matter, scientists say. All that really counts is cutting calories and sticking with it, according to a federal study that followed people for two years. However, participants had trouble staying with a single approach that long and the weight loss was modest for most.

As the world grapples with rising obesity, millions have turned to popular diets like Atkins, Zone and Ornish that tout the benefits of one nutrient over another.

Some previous studies have found that low carbohydrate diets like Atkins work better than a traditional low-fat diet. But the new research found that the key to losing weight boiled down to a basic rule - calories in, calories out.

“The hidden secret is it doesn’t matter if you focus on low-fat or low-carb,” said Dr. Elizabeth Nabel, director of the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, which funded the research.

Limiting the calories you consume and burning off more calories with exercise is key, she said.

The study, which appears in Thursday’s New England Journal of Medicine, was led by Harvard School of Public Health and Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Louisiana.

Researchers randomly assigned 811 overweight adults to one of four diets, each of which contained different levels of fat, protein and carbohydrates.

Though the diets were twists on commercial plans, the study did not directly compare popular diets. The four diets contained healthy fats, were high in whole grains, fruits and vegetables and were low in cholesterol.

Nearly two-thirds of the participants were women. Each dieter was encouraged to slash 750 calories a day from their diet, exercise 90 minutes a week, keep an online food diary and meet regularly with diet counselors to chart their progress.

There was no winner among the different diets; reduction in weight and waist size were similar in all groups.

People lost 13 pounds on average at six months, but all groups saw their weight creep back up after a year. At two years, the average weight loss was about 9 pounds while waistlines shrank an average of 2 inches. Only 15 percent of dieters achieved a weight-loss reduction of 10 percent or more of their starting weight.

Dieters who got regular counseling saw better results. Those who attended most meetings shed more pounds than those who did not - 22 pounds compared with the average 9 pound loss.

Lead researcher Dr. Frank Sacks of Harvard said a restricted calorie diet gives people greater food choices, making the diet less monotonous.

“They just need to focus on how much they’re eating,” he said.

Sacks said the trick is finding a healthy diet that is tasty and that people will stick with over time.

Before Debbie Mayer, 52, enrolled in the study, she was a “stress eater” who would snack all day and had no sense of portion control. Mayer used to run marathons in her 30s, but health problems prevented her from doing much exercise in recent years.

Mayer tinkered with different diets - Weight Watchers, Atkins, South Beach - with little success.

“I’ve been battling my weight all my life. I just needed more structure,” said Mayer, of Brockton, Mass., who works with the elderly.

Mayer was assigned to a low-fat, high-protein diet with 1,400 calories a day. She started measuring her food and went back to the gym. The 5-foot Mayer started at 179 pounds and dropped 50 pounds to 129 pounds by the end of the study. She now weighs 132 and wants to shed a few more pounds.

Another study volunteer, Rudy Termini, a 69-year-old retiree from Cambridge, Mass., credits keeping a food diary for his 22-pound success. Termini said before participating in the study he would wolf down 2,500 calories a day. But sticking to an 1,800-calorie high-fat, average protein diet meant no longer eating an entire T-bone steak for dinner. Instead, he now eats only a 4-ounce steak.

“I was just oblivious to how many calories I was having,” said the 5-foot-11-inch Termini, who dropped from 195 to 173 pounds. “I really used to just eat everything and anything in sight.”

Dr. David Katz of the Yale Prevention Research Center and author of several weight control books, said the results should not be viewed as an endorsement of fad diets that promote one nutrient over another.

The study compared high quality, heart healthy diets and “not the gimmicky popular versions,” said Katz, who had no role in the study. Some popular low-carb diets tend to be low in fiber and have a relatively high intake of saturated fat, he said.

Other experts were bothered that the dieters couldn’t keep the weight off even with close monitoring and a support system.

“Even these highly motivated, intelligent participants who were coached by expert professionals could not achieve the weight losses needed to reverse the obesity epidemic,” Martijn Katan of Amsterdam’s Free University wrote in an accompanying editorial.

BEIJING - U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Chinese officials say they will expand high-level talks on economic issues to include troubling security matters as well.

The two nations also agreed Saturday to cooperate in stabilizing the global economy and combating climate change, putting aside long-standing concerns about human rights.

With the export-heavy Chinese economy reeling from the U.S. downturn, Clinton sought in meetings with Premier Wen Jiabao and other top Chinese government leaders to reassure Beijing that its massive holdings of U.S. Treasury notes and other government debt would remain a good investment.

“I appreciate greatly the Chinese government’s continuing confidence in United States treasuries. I think that’s a well-grounded confidence,” Clinton told reporters at a joint news conference with Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi.

“We have every reason to believe that the United States and China will recover, and together we will help lead the world recovery,” she said.

After a day of talks on her first visit to China as America’s top diplomat, Clinton and Yang said a regular high-level U.S.-China dialogue on economic matters would be expanded to include security issues.

Details of the dialogue are to be finalized by President Barack Obama and Chinese President Hu Jintao when they meet at an economic summit in London in early April, Clinton said.

Yang said China wants its foreign exchange reserves - the world’s largest at $1.95 trillion - invested safely, with good value and liquidity. He said future decisions on using them would be based on those principles, but added that China wanted to continue work with the U.S.

“I want to emphasize here that the facts speak louder than words. The fact is that China and the United States have conducted good cooperation, and we are ready to continue to talk with the U.S. side,” Yang said.

Beijing is the last and perhaps most important stop on Clinton’s weeklong visit to Japan, Indonesia, South Korea and China on which she wanted to focus on the economy and global warming.

China last year surpassed the United States as the world’s leading producer of greenhouse gases and Clinton said she and Chinese officials had agreed to develop clean energy technology that would use renewable sources and safely store the dirty emissions from burning coal.

Visiting a new gas-fueled power plant in Beijing, Clinton urged China not to repeat the “same mistakes” western countries had made when they developed.

“When we were industrializing and growing we didn’t know any better,” she said. “Neither did Europe. Now we are smart enough to figure out how to have the right kind of growth, sustainable growth, clean-energy driven growth. This plant could be a model.”

Along with cooperating on the financial crisis and climate change, the United States wants China to step up efforts to address threats like Iran and North Korea’s nuclear programs and tenuous security situations in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

In addition, Clinton said the U.S. would like to see China play a positive role in Myanmar and Sudan, two countries which receive large Chinese investments but whose governments are at odds with Washington.

The emphasis on the global economy, climate change and security highlight the growing importance of U.S.-China relations, which have often soured over disagreements on human rights.

Authorities in Beijing are facing a difficult year on the rights front as they deal with politically sensitive anniversaries: 20 years since the crushing of the Tiananmen Square democracy movement and 50 since the failed Tibetan uprising that forced the Dalai Lama to flee into exile.

Activists complained Saturday that Chinese police were monitoring dissidents and had confined some to their homes during Clinton’s two-day visit. Several of those targeted had signed “Charter 08,” an unusually open call for civil rights and political reforms that circulated in December, according to the China Human Rights Defenders.

But ahead of her talks, Clinton signaled that China’s poor human rights record, while still of deep concern to the United States, would not be at the top of her agenda.

She noted that both sides already knew the other’s positions on the matter and said that human rights concerns “can’t interfere with the global economic crisis, the global climate change crisis and the security crises.”

Her comments drew immediate fire from rights groups who said they sent the wrong message, undermined efforts to promote basic freedoms in China and squandered Washington’s leverage with Beijing.

Asked to respond to the criticism, Clinton said “the promotion of human rights is an essential aspect of our global foreign policy,” noting in particular the issues of Tibet, religious freedom and freedom of expression.

“Human rights are part of our comprehensive agenda,” she said.

But she added that the work of civic groups and private advocates that she has highlighted is “at least as important in building respect for and making progress on human rights” as government-to-government contact.

Yang appeared pleased by Clinton’s reply, saying China was happy to engage on human rights with the United States but only “on the basis of equality and noninterference in each other’s internal affairs.”