News

Sanford Siegal used to be embarrassed by the label Cookie Doctor. Now, 32 years after launching a celebrated weight-loss program with an irresistible selling point - a hunger-curbing dessert - the 78-year-old Miami physician wants to make sure the concept doesn't follow him to his grave.

In a break with his prescription-only policy, he is expanding beyond South Florida this month and making his cookies available directly to consumers across North America through pharmacies and over the Internet. The cost for a week's supply of the fat-busting snacks: about $60.

"I fear this thing will disappear with me, and I don't want it to disappear," says the soft-spoken diet guru, who runs three clinics in the Miami area and is at work on a book titled Dr. Siegal's Cookie Diet.

But there's another, more calculated motive for the rollout and publicity campaign.

Dr. Siegal says he's frustrated by the recent rise of "knockoff" brands and, in particular, wants to stop a Canadian-trained doctor from horning in on his cookie crown.

This past February, Siegal's company filed a federal lawsuit in the Southern District of Florida against Dr. Sasson Moulavi, a former business associate, accusing him of swiping the Siegal name and "Cookie Diet" trademark to sell a copycat line of biscuits containing a similar protein-rich formula designed to subdue food cravings.

The biscuit battle marks a bitter turning point in the history of a local diet phenomenon that boasts "countless" testimonials of 100-pound-plus losses, Dr. Siegal says, and that has been hailed on many television shows, including ABC's Good Morning America.

Dr. Moulavi, who graduated from the University of Toronto's faculty of medicine and practised as a family physician in Canada in the early 1990s, is medical director of Smart for Life Weight Management Centers LLC, a Florida-based chain of 36 diet clinics that includes three locations in Canada, one in Vaughan, north of Toronto, and two in Montreal. The firm's main business hook: a hunger-suppressing cookie.

"Under his model, [the cookie diet concept] would never have grown," Dr. Moulavi says. "Now he's trying to ride what we've done."

At the heart of the feud is a licensing agreement that turned sour last year. According to court documents, Smart for Life acquired the rights to sell Dr. Siegal's line of products, including shakes and soups, beginning in September, 2004. But Dr. Moulavi called the deal off in August, 2006, claiming breach of contract.

Dr. Moulavi alleges Dr. Siegal's company, SM Licensing Corp., refused to produce French labels for his two Montreal-area clinics. "Basically, he did not label his cookies. We had no choice. We had to make a better cookie ourselves."

For his part, Dr. Siegal declines to comment on details of the case or debate the relative merits of the closely guarded recipes. But it's clear the products differ in at least one respect. Dr. Siegal's cookies are round, while Dr. Moulavi's are square.

The concept of a handy meal supplement followed years of research by Dr. Siegal into natural proteins that could help his obese patients ward off hunger.

Why cookies? Most patients were female, and he wanted something that could be tucked into a purse for convenience.

"Immediately, my diet became known as the Cookie Diet and I became known as the Cookie Doctor," Dr. Siegal recalls. "It was a little embarrassing because it seemed undignified. But I was stuck with it."

He soon added an ancillary bakery to his full-time medical practice, turning out 150,000 cookies a day by 1985. Oatmeal-raisin has since been joined by four other flavours, including blueberry and banana.

How do they taste? "I'm not going to compete with great bakery cookies," Dr. Siegal says. "Patients generally like them."

Though it may smack of dessert, the cookie diet is not for the weak-willed. Patients get six cookies a day to snack on as a substitute for breakfast and lunch. "Dinner" is a humble 300 calories, usually in the form of lean protein, such as chicken, fish or turkey, and a small salad or serving of vegetables. At 800 calories total - roughly one-third the recommended daily adult intake - patients are almost guaranteed dramatic results, typically 12 to 15 pounds a month. "The weight just pours off them," Dr. Siegal says. "There isn't any question of 'Is it going to work?' Of course it's going to work."

Dr. Moulavi's plan at Smart for Life is slightly more liberal, at 800 to 1,000 calories a day.

One person who needs no convincing of either plan is David Schwartz, a Smart for Life patient in Montreal who started on Dr. Siegal's round cookies and moved on to Dr. Moulavi's square ones.

At 380 pounds, the 5-foot, 8-inch Mr. Schwartz had been on a waiting list for gastric-bypass surgery to reduce his stomach size when his family doctor mentioned Smart for Life. Skeptical at first, he signed up in February, 2006, vowing to stay the course for a week. Seven days later, he had shed 10½ pounds. By week two, he'd lost another five. "That got me hooked," Mr. Schwartz says.

In just over 10 months, the 56-year-old dropped 160 pounds and has been hovering at about 220 ever since. "I was looking forward to Monday mornings, getting on the scale," he says. "When they tell you you lost three, four, five pounds, that was a fix for me. I became sort of addicted to it."

Until this month, Dr. Siegal had steadfastly refused to dispense cookies outside his practice, even privately to family or friends, insisting extreme calorie-reduced plans need medical supervision. He also rejected modestly overweight applicants, making exceptions for "models," "entertainers" and "a few jockeys" for whom excess ounces were an occupational liability.

He did, however, occasionally bow to pressure from eager physicians wanting to administer the cookies to their own patients. At one point, he says, he had individual deals with as many as 200 independent physicians in the United States.

"We were deluged constantly with stores that wanted to sell our cookies and other doctors who wanted to use them, and from time to time I would give in," he said. "It wasn't my real desire to do this because I wanted to make sure the product was used properly and under proper physician's supervision."

The falling-out with Dr. Moulavi turned out to be the final straw.

Dr. Siegal's statement of claim indicates he is seeking compensatory and punitive damages, plus an injunction to stop the defendant from using the Siegal name and "Cookie Diet" trademark, as well as the CookieDiet.com Web address. (For now, Dr. Siegal has had to resort to the more cumbersome CookieDietCookies.com address to launch his Internet sales.)

For his part, Dr. Moulavi insists Smart for Life's monitoring program is more rigorous and he criticizes his predecessor for plotting an over-the-counter marketing offensive. "This is not about a cookie; this is about much more than that. [The cookies] will not work without a doctor, period. Patients need to come in every week to get weighed and get motivated."

As for the lawsuit, Dr. Moulavi, who plans to open 50 more Smart for Life clinics in the next year, including two in Toronto and three in Vancouver, insists he was the first to register the "Cookie Diet" name in the United States and is countersuing Dr. Siegal over the trademark.

He also argues that the idea of a body-toning biscuit isn't in danger of dying with Dr. Siegal because it wasn't born with him in the first place. "The first meal replacement diet that used something that looked like a cookie was in the Fifties, and that was in California."