A Crusader From the Heartland: PHILIP SOKOLOF

Across the country last week, it was front-page news. By the end of April, the fast-food giant McDonald’s would begin offering the McLean Deluxe, a hamburger that contains only 9% fat, less than half the fat content of its traditional burgers. The new hamburger, exulted McDonald’s president, “is good news for people who like beef but who want to reduce their fat intake.”

Health experts and nutritionists hailed the decision. But no one was more delighted than the lone man who through persistence and intimidation practically coerced McDonald’s into making the move: Omaha industrialist Philip Sokolof, 68. Besieged by the press last week in the wake of the announcement, Sokolof, a dead ringer for actor Hal Holbrook, adopted a modest pose. “This is a very great day for the American people,” he declared.

It was a pretty good day for Sokolof too. For it marked the greatest victory yet in his remarkable crusade to improve the diet and protect the hearts of millions of Americans. Single-handedly, with messianic zeal, a keen public relations sense and some $3 million of his own money, Sokolof has persuaded many of the nation’s largest food processors and fast-food chains to change both their ways and the ingredients of their products. In the process he has outraged corporate executives, given tropical oils a bad name and turned supermarket aisles into America’s new libraries, clogged with shoppers reading ingredient labels.

Sokolof’s motivation comes straight from the heart, his own heart, which nearly stopped beating in 1966. He remembers the day of his heart attack well. “Oct. 27,” he says. “It’s not like the birth of your child, but it’s memorable.” And it came out of the blue. As founder and president of Omaha’s Phillips Manufacturing Co., Sokolof drove himself relentlessly but seemed to be in good shape. “I was thin,” he recalls. “I’m 5 ft. 10 in., and I weighed only 145 lbs. I did the Royal Canadian Air Force exercises regularly; I worked out and ran a mile once or twice a week.”

Luckily for Sokolof, who was addicted to ice cream, hamburgers, hot dogs and “anything greasy,” his doctor was one of the early believers in the association of fatty foods with high cholesterol and heart disease. He warned Sokolof that his cholesterol reading, at 300, was dangerously high and prescribed a low-fat diet. Within a few months, Sokolof’s cholesterol level had dropped to 190 (it is now 150). During his recovery, he pestered his doctor with questions about cholesterol, plaque and other heart-related topics. “Phil,” he recalls the doctor saying, “I can’t make you a cardiologist.” But Sokolof pressed on. “Now I consider myself an amateur cardiologist,” he says, “and I know a lot more about cholesterol than some of them do.”

In 1984, after a federally sponsored study confirmed cholesterol’s role in heart disease, Sokolof decided to act. With a million dollars drawn from his personal account, he founded the National Heart Savers Association, which consists mainly of Sokolof and two assistants. NHSA’s goal: to call attention to the dangers of high cholesterol levels and, says Sokolof earnestly, “to save people’s lives.”

During the next four years, NHSA sponsored free cholesterol testing for 200,000 people in 16 cities and towns across the U.S. To spread the word further, Sokolof in 1988 successfully lobbied Congress to designate April as “Know Your Cholesterol Month” and heralded the fact with full-page ads in major newspapers. That month more Americans had their cholesterol tested than in any previous month. Sokolof was elated, but concerned that the public was still unaware that many of its favorite food brands were laden not only with cholesterol but also with saturated fat, which the body converts into cholesterol.

The next month, he mailed 11,000 letters to food-industry officials. The first sentence was bound to catch their attention: “Is your company an accessory in the deaths of untold numbers of heart attack victims?” The letter went on to urge the food companies to remove coconut and palm oil from their products, as well as lard and beef tallow, all of which contain high levels of saturated fat. NHSA, the letter warned, planned soon to alert the public about “the dangers of highly saturated oil products.”

Few companies bothered to respond, and Sokolof’s follow-up telephone calls went largely unheeded. “When I said, ‘I’m Phil Sokolof from Heart Savers,’ ” he recalls, “that was the same as saying, ‘I’m Joe Blow from Podunk.’ “

But, as the food companies learned, Phil Sokolof was not a man to be ignored. In October 1988, they were confronted by full-page newspaper ads written and designed by Sokolof and headlined THE POISONING OF AMERICA! The text identified the poisoners: food processors who used tropical oils high in saturated fats. “We implore you. Do not buy products containing palm oil or coconut oil,” the ads warned. “Your life may be at stake.” Pictured below, to the horror of several major companies, was an assortment of some of + America’s favorite brand-name foods.

The intensity of the reaction surprised even Sokolof. Corporate executives, or lawyers representing them, called Omaha and threatened lawsuits. But as sales of some of the brands pictured in the ad plummeted, seven large companies announced in quick succession that they were removing tropical oils from their products.

More POISONING OF AMERICA ads followed, and when Nabisco failed to budge, Sokolof singled it out, concluding, “The American public deserves better from its largest food processor.” The following day a Nabisco executive called Sokolof to assure him that the giant company would hasten the reformulation of its products.

“I feel that I have developed a rapport with the American public,” Sokolof says. “They like the fact that a little guy in Omaha is sitting here and taking on Nabisco, a $25 billion corporation. I’ve had some success, and I’ve made a lot of money, but compared with Nabisco, I’m a pimple on an elephant’s fanny.”

Having whipped the food processors into line, Sokolof redirected his fire. In yet another POISONING ad last April, he took on the fast-food chains, focusing on the largest. MCDONALD’S, a subheadline charged, YOUR HAMBURGERS HAVE TOO MUCH FAT! A combination of a Big Mac and French fries, the ad reported, was “loaded” with 25 grams of saturated fat, and those French fries were cooked in fat-laden beef tallow.

McDonald’s was flabbergasted. Through its attorney, former Health, Education and Welfare Secretary Joseph Califano, it warned newspapers that the ad was “riddled with error” and that further publication of such ads without corrections “would have to be considered malicious.”

Undaunted, with few exceptions, major newspapers ran another Sokolof ad in July. This one was headlined MCDONALD’S, YOUR HAMBURGERS STILL HAVE TOO MUCH FAT! AND YOUR FRENCH FRIES STILL ARE COOKED WITH BEEF TALLOW. The ad noted that Burger King and Wendy’s were also culpable and reported an Advertising Age poll revealing that 38% of Americans who saw Sokolof’s first set of ads had decreased their patronage of fast-food restaurants. It also pointed out that laboratory tests conducted for the New York Times had confirmed the accuracy of those ads.

Fast-food resistance began to crumble under the assault. By the end of the month, Burger King, Wendy’s and finally McDonald’s announced that they were switching to healthy vegetable oils for cooking French fries. And they began working harder to develop leaner burgers. “The dominoes have fallen,” Sokolof said. “I couldn’t be happier. Millions of ounces of saturated fat won’t be clogging the arteries of American people.”

Sokolof, born in Omaha in 1922, has always enjoyed center stage. Starting tap-dance lessons at age six, he soon won first prize at a children’s talent show. He still recalls the drill. “Left, right, shuffle, shuffle, tap, tap,” he says, his body swaying with the remembered rhythm. At nine, he made the first of his many career changes, taking voice lessons and singing at weddings and bar mitzvahs. After high school, he took to the road for four years as a vocalist with a succession of bands, performing in ballrooms and nightclubs across the country.

But by the time he was 21, Sokolof says, “I realized that life wasn’t just hats and horns.” Returning to Omaha, he went into business with his father, who owned several liquor stores and bars. In his late 20s, Sokolof turned to building houses, one or two at a time, on speculation.

Around that time, in the early 1950s, when dry wall was rapidly replacing plaster in new houses, one of Sokolof’s employees arrived at work with two cartons of corner bead, the metallic strips used to join dry wall at a corner. “I looked at the price,” Sokolof recalls, “and thought, ‘My God! That’s really high.’ ” After checking the cost of steel and the fabricating technique, he decided he could undercut the only two national companies producing the bead.

He bought a $15,000 machine, rented a building for $75 a month and went into business. “I made the product, went out on the road and sold it, and came back and did the invoices.” Offering the corner bead at a few dollars less per 1,000 ft. than his big competitors, Sokolof began turning a profit by his second month of operation.

It was all uphill from there. Today Sokolof’s privately held firm, the Phillips Manufacturing Co., has 120 employees and two Omaha plants that specialize in producing various dry-wall channels and metallic building studs. Profits from the company and some shrewd stock investments have made Sokolof a wealthy man, with a fortune that he admits is “well into eight figures.”

All his success, Sokolof says, cannot compensate for the one great tragedy of his life, the death in 1982 of his wife Ruth, after a 15-year struggle with cancer. “I don’t cry easily,” Sokolof says, but when he talks about Ruth, which he does incessantly, there are tears in his eyes and a tremor in his voice. In his spacious condominium, where he lives alone, he proudly shows visitors her paintings and clippings about her charitable work with blind children. “She made me a better person,” he says.

Sokolof now spends some 80% of his working time on NHSA business, which he conducts largely by telephone out of his office at Phillips. These days his calls to food companies are immediately transferred to top executives, many of whom he knows by first name. Around 10 p.m., he drives home in his white Mercedes sports coupe, prepares his own low-fat dinner and labors over the work he has brought with him. Later he pedals furiously on his exercise bicycle while watching his favorite TV show, Jeopardy, taped earlier on his video recorder. Often he stays up until 2 or 3 a.m. “I find it hard to go to sleep at night,” he says, “because there are so many things to do.”

One of those things was to ensure passage by Congress of a strict food- labeling bill, sponsored by Democratic Representative Henry Waxman of California. When it appeared that the bill would be shunted aside last year, Sokolof paid a total of $650,000 for full-page ads urging Congress to adopt the measure. Then, concerned that Republican Orrin Hatch of Utah was delaying its passage by tacking amendments to the Senate version of the bill, Sokolof ran ads in the Washington Post, the Washington Times and all the Utah dailies. “Senator Hatch,” the ads read, “please cease your attempts to alter and dilute” the bill. “If the Senate does not pass this bill, you will bear the responsibility.” Hatch backed down, the bill was passed, and Waxman invited Sokolof to attend its signing in Washington. “This bill,” declared Waxman, “is a tribute to Sokolof’s tenacity.”

That tenacity was evident again last weekend, as Sokolof worked far into the night preparing a full-page ad scheduled to run this week in major newspapers. The ad extols the virtues of McDonald’s new hamburgers and advises Wendy’s and Burger King that they too had better take the lean route. From deep in America’s heartland, Sokolof is ready to strike again.