Crusader Targets 2% Milk Millionaire Activist Spends Own Money To Skim Fat From U.S. Diets

If you think 2 percent milk is low in fat, cholesterol crusader Phil Sokolof wants to tell you you’re wrong. And he’s using the dairy industry’s own advertising gimmick - a woman with a milk “mustache” - to do it.

Sokolof, a millionaire Nebraska businessman who uses his personal fortune to fight fat in the American diet, bought ads in today’s editions of leading national newspapers, including The Spokesman-Review, saying three cups of 2 percent “low-fat” milk have as much saturated fat as about a half pound of bacon.

“Would you let your child eat nine strips of bacon a day?” reads Sokolof’s ad featuring a plump mother wearing a milk mustache. “My family just switched from 2 percent to skim milk. We’ll all be healthier, and I’ll lose weight,” she says.

Today’s ads, many of them full-page, mock a series of dairy industry ads that show celebrities such as Christie Brinkley and Lauren Bacall with milk on their upper lips.

“The (Sokolof) ad is not only unfair, it’s misleading,” says Charlie Decker, executive director of the National Fluid Milk Processor Promotion Board.

Decker doesn’t quarrel with the factual content of Sokolof’s ads - that 2 percent milk has 3 grams of saturated fat per cup, or about the same as three pieces of bacon. But, he says, the ads could “scare people away from drinking milk entirely, aggravating what now is a major health concern: a lack of calcium in some peoples’ diets, especially young women.”

Comparing milk with bacon makes Sokolof’s ads ridiculous from a nutrition standpoint, says Greg Miller, vice president of nutritional and technical services for the American Dairy Council. “Milk supplies a storehouse of nutrients that bacon doesn’t, particularly calcium, potassium and vitamin D. It is the balance of a total diet that is important - not one specific food.”

In a telephone interview, Sokolof, president of the National Heart Association, explained that his mission is twofold: first, to drive people to drink skim milk and, second, “to show that 2 percent milk is not low in fat.”

Technically, 2 percent milk, with 5 grams of total fat per 8-ounce serving, does not qualify as a low-fat food under the Nutrition Labeling and Education Act of 1991, which requires a low-fat food to have fewer than 3 grams of fat per serving. But because it traditionally has been known as “low-fat milk,” 2 percent milk was allowed to retain the designation.

Sokolof, who survived a near fatal heart attack in 1966, says he is spending $500,000 on this campaign, bringing his total anti-fat, anti-cholesterol expenditures to more than $8 million since he began the campaign in 1988. Saying he is combating industry giants by using their own tactics - mainly advertising - he often has purchased full-page newspaper spreads, including once assailing specific companies for “poisoning America” with saturated fat.

In 1990, he blasted McDonald’s for having too much fat in its hamburgers. A year later, McDonald’s introduced the lower-fat McLean Deluxe burger.