Attack of the Anti-Fat Man : Just Who Is Phil Sokolof and Why Is He Picking On Milk (and the Foods We Love to Eat)?
Sitting in his rose-carpeted and teakwood office, amid modern art and pictures of his grandchildren, Phil Sokolof in his gray suit and subdued floral print tie appears the model of a conservative businessman.
But Sokolof, a self-made multimillionaire, sold his construction material business in 1992 to devote all his time to his crusade against cholesterol. His self-financed National Heart Savers Assn. battles dietary fat in a fourth-floor suite in the Financial Plaza, a sleekly modern mid-town complex. Sokolof’s four-person staff works in a pleasant open office with wraparound windows and vases of tulips on the desks. The phones ring constantly with requests for interviews and information.
“Would you let your child eat 9 strips of bacon a day?” demands the headline in his newest full-page advertisement that appeared in newspapers around the country in April.
The ad depicts a hefty, smiling woman with a milk mustache and the boldfaced warning: “DRINK SKIM MILK! DON’T DRINK 2% MILK!”
“The point of this campaign is to make the American public aware that 2% milk is not low-fat and it shouldn’t have that label,” Sokolof explains earnestly. He has just spent $500,000 on the ads in 40 newspapers.
“We’ve had good follow-up,” he says. The Washington Post and the Phil Donohue Show have just called, and he’d had several radio interviews the day before.
The satisfying momentum of the week had started with a live appearance on NBC’s “Today.” Host Bryant Gumbel introduced Sokolof as “America’s No. 1 Cholesterol Fighter,” and he won his point about fat in a verbal skirmish with Greg Miller, a spokesman for the National Dairy Council.
Sokolof says he had been a little nervous about the “Today” debate. “This has been such a rigorous time and I’d only had two hours’ sleep. I was thinking, ‘Gee, I wonder if I’ll be sharp enough.’ But I had the stronger side--you always know that when they try to change the subject. He wanted to talk about calcium instead of fat.”
A conversation with Phil Sokolof never strays far from the subject of fat.
A graduate of Omaha’s South High, Sokolof worked in his father’s fruit market until he was 17, then went on the road singing with bands. He still sings occasionally, appearing this spring in the Omaha Press Club Gridiron show. His parody of “Young at Heart” got a standing ovation. “They were amazed I could sing so well,” he says.
Sokolof gave up professional singing after 10 years on the road and returned to Nebraska, where he got into the construction business, eventually designing a lightweight stripping for drywall and starting his firm, Phillips Manufacturing.
If Omaha, with its tradition of aged steaks and barbecued ribs, seems an unlikely spot for launching anti-fat attacks, that is only one unconventional aspect of Sokolof’s crusade, which began with his own near-fatal heart attack in 1966 at the age of 44.
It was a total shock. “I was in shape, I was athletic and I was a nonsmoker,” he says.
He also was addicted to hamburgers and hot dogs and tamales. “If it was greasy I ate it. My cholesterol count was 300.”
He dug into cholesterol research, and lowered his count from 300 to 150. In 1984, when the first major government study of diet and heart attacks launched the anti-fat, anti-cholesterol era, he went public.
Sokolof delivers a nonstop monologue on the dangers of cholesterol. His human side emerges when he talks about his family. He boasts about his grandchildren’s scholastic achievements and gets a little teary when he talks about his wife, Ruth, the major inspiration for his determination. She suffered for years with glandular cancer, yet raised their children, Steven and Karen, and founded a school for blind children. “She made me a more caring person,” says Sokolof, who has lived alone since her death in 1982.
Sokolof formed Heart Savers and conducted the first citywide cholesterol tests in Grand Island, Neb. “We tested 8,500 people in five days and we turned people away,” he said. “It proved that people wanted to know their cholesterol count.”
He came to Capitol Hill and tested more than 10,000 congressional staff and members of Congress. He crusaded for leaner school lunches, sponsored a National Cholesterol Awareness Month, and doled out thousands of dollars in prizes for a nationwide sweepstake contest to induce kids and adults to read the 1994 nutrition labels.
This spring he paid for a “Cut Fat Intake and Live Longer” billboard towering over New York’s Times Square--replacing the famous Joe Camel puffing smoke into the air.
But his trademark has been the newspaper ads bristling with negative buzzwords. When his letters asking food manufacturers to remove highly saturated coconut oil and palm oil from their products were not answered, he unleashed a series of newspaper ads in 1988-’89. He designed them himself, with headlines decrying “The POISONING of AMERICA!” indicting such household names as Kellogg’s Cracklin’ Oat Bran, Sunshine’s Hydrox cookies, Pepperidge Farm’s Goldfish and Nabisco’s Triscuits.
In the years since the public became much more concerned with dietary fat, there has been an industrywide change to oils lower in saturated fat, such as soybean, cottonseed and canola. “That campaign really had legs,” Sokolof recalls with satisfaction.
Sokolof’s next target was fast food. This ad blitz informed McDonald’s restaurants’ 22 million daily customers that a Big Mac and french fries exceeded the total recommended daily intake of saturated fat.
When McDonald’s introduced the McLean Deluxe and, along with other fast-food chains, switched to a lower-fat cooking oil, Sokolof ran a series of congratulatory ads. McDonald’s, however, has emphasized that its changes came from ongoing research and not the pressure of anybody’s ads.
Sokolof’s cholesterol crusade, which has cost him $8 million, has often outraged the food industry and professional nutritionists. While no food company disputes Sokolof’s facts about fat, few give him credit for influencing change. His ads have been called everything from “absurd” to “the worst kind of sensationalism.”
It’s all in the point of view. The Journal of the American Medical Assn. has said of the splashy campaigns: “Phil Sokolof has arguably done more to inform Americans about cholesterol than the efforts of academic medical centers, the federal government and major health organizations.”
Michael Jacobson, executive director of Washington’s Center for Science and the Public Interest, says, “He’s not a nutritionist and I don’t think he will advance our understanding of the science of nutrition. He is a businessman and his role is to alert the public to cut down on fat and cholesterol.
“Most rich people spend their money on vacations and country clubs,” adds Jacobson, whose center has studied the health risks of such foods as buttered popcorn. “He spends his to reduce the epidemic rate of heart disease.”
About milk. Sorting through a stack of papers, Sokolof produces documentation from the Food and Drug Administration’s Office of Food Labeling verifying that whole milk contains 3.3% butterfat, eight grams of fat per cup; 2% milk contains 2% butterfat, five grams of fat per cup. That means that 2% milk does not meet FDA labeling requirements for “low fat,” which is three grams or less of fat.
But because of a complicated exemption when the Nutrition Labeling Bill was passed, the dairy industry was allowed to use a pre-existing definition of “low fat” for milk that exceeds the three grams of fat.
The result, Sokolof says, is that a lot of health-conscious people think they are doing themselves a big favor when they drop from whole milk to 2% when, in reality, it’s only a small favor: “Except for children under 2, anyone would be better off with 1% milk, which has three grams of fat per serving--or, better still, skim milk, which has virtually none.”
Ann Grandjean, director of the Center for Human Nutrition in Omaha, objects to the “scare tactics” of the current milk campaign. “Women aren’t getting enough calcium now, and the last thing we need is for them to stop drinking milk,” she says. “Looking at a single food, or a single nutrient as Phil does, is very simplistic. Nutrition is a complicated business.”
Emphasizing that milk is found in almost every American refrigerator, Sokolof insists that red-flag tactics are necessary. He is already planning his next campaign: Fortify skim milk, “so it won’t look blue.”
He has no plans to expand Heart Savers. After his first cholesterol tests, drug companies showed interest in underwriting the projects, but Sokolof has turned down any partnerships.
“Part of my credibility is that I finance Heart Savers with my own money,” he says, adding that he has enough money to continue his campaigns “as long as I have something to say that people will listen to.”
