A class action lawsuit against David Protein bars has gone viral, dragging in Mean Girls references and reigniting the old debate about whether “healthy” snack labels can actually be trusted. But underneath the social media noise is a genuinely interesting food science story, one involving a fat substitute most people have never heard of, a decades-old regulatory pathway, and a fundamental question about how we count calories in the first place.
tldr
- A class action lawsuit filed in January 2026 claims David Protein bars contain up to 275 calories per serving, nearly double the 150 calories listed on the label.
- Founder Peter Rahal says the independent lab used a bomb calorimeter, which counts calories from ingredients the body never actually digests, making the test method wrong for this product.
- The bars contain EPG (esterified propoxylated glycerol), a fat substitute that behaves like fat in cooking and texture but passes through the body largely unabsorbed, contributing far fewer calories than regular fat.
- EPG has FDA GRAS status and a more robust safety record than its predecessor Olestra, with significantly milder GI side effects, though no long-term human data exists yet.
- The lawsuit exposes a real gap: FDA-compliant calorie counts using non-digestible ingredients can be technically correct and still deeply confusing to everyday consumers reading a label.
What the Lawsuit Actually Says
Filed in January 2026, the class action lawsuit alleges that David Protein bars contain dramatically more calories and fat than their labels claim. Independent lab tests cited in the suit found the bars contained between 268 and 275 calories per serving, along with 11 to 13.5 grams of fat. The label says 150 calories and 2 grams of fat. That is a discrepancy of roughly 80% more calories and more than five times the stated fat content.
The plaintiffs argue this violates FDA standards, which prohibit a product’s actual nutrient content from exceeding the declared value on the label by more than 20%. The situation spawned a wave of social media posts comparing it to the famous Mean Girls scene where the queen bee discovers the “healthy” diet bars she has been eating were actually causing her to gain weight. David founder Peter Rahal pushed back directly: “No one is getting Regina Georged.”
The Defense: It Is All About EPG
Rahal’s core argument is that the lab testing methodology was wrong. He says the independent lab used a bomb calorimeter, a device that measures the total energy in a substance by burning it. The problem, he argues, is that a bomb calorimeter measures every calorie in every ingredient, including ingredients the human body never actually digests or absorbs.
The ingredient at the center of the debate is EPG, or esterified propoxylated glycerol, sold commercially under the brand name Epogee. David bars use it as a fat substitute. Rahal says this is precisely what makes a 150-calorie label legitimate: EPG behaves like fat in cooking and texture, but the body cannot properly digest it, so most of it passes through. “This is what makes David have 150 calories,” he said. “It’s really a special ingredient that allows the food to taste like fat but doesn’t have the caloric impact.”
So What Is EPG, Exactly?
EPG is a modified fat that was originally invented in the 1980s by ARCO Chemical Company and has been in commercial development for decades. It is made by taking ordinary fats and oils, breaking them down into glycerol and fatty acids, and then inserting propylene glycol units between them. This structural modification is the key to everything. The propylene glycol units physically block the digestive enzymes called lipases from doing their job, which means the fat cannot be properly broken down or absorbed in the gastrointestinal tract.
Studies show that roughly 70 to 80 percent of ingested EPG is recovered in feces, with only 10 to 20 percent absorbed. That is why EPG carries an estimated 1 to 2 calories per gram compared to 9 calories per gram for regular fat. Epogee, the company that now commercializes EPG, describes it as reducing 92% of calories from fat while delivering full-fat functionality in terms of taste and texture.
EPG received FDA GRAS (Generally Recognized as Safe) status in 2016, meaning the agency reviewed the safety submission and raised no questions. It is positioned for use across baked goods, confections, chocolate coatings, fried snacks, and frozen desserts.
The Ghost of Olestra
Anyone who was paying attention to food news in the late 1990s will notice a familiar pattern here. Olestra, sold as Olean and developed by Procter and Gamble, was another non-digestible fat substitute that made headlines for all the wrong reasons. It caused significant gastrointestinal side effects at scale, depleted fat-soluble vitamins from the body, and generated such negative press coverage that it effectively killed the market for zero-calorie fats for a generation.
EPG was specifically engineered to avoid Olestra’s failures. Peer-reviewed research published in Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology covering a comprehensive series of safety studies found no acute, subchronic, or chronic oral toxicity in animal studies, no genotoxicity, no carcinogenicity, and no adverse effects on reproductive development. Short-term human trials at doses of 10, 25, and 40 grams per day over eight weeks found no clinically significant effects on circulating retinol, alpha-tocopherol, or vitamin D.
There are some nuances, however. The same human study found that circulating beta-carotene and vitamin K1 levels were modestly lower in EPG groups, and that EPG at higher doses (25 grams per day and above) was associated with more frequent GI adverse events including gas, soft stools, and oily spotting compared to a control group. At 10 grams per day, the only statistically significant difference was oily spotting. The researchers concluded that these effects could be minimized by using a solid form of EPG and keeping consumption moderate.
The critical difference from Olestra comes down to chemistry. Olestra has an octanol-water partition coefficient above 40, meaning it holds onto fat-soluble nutrients very tightly as it moves through the gut. EPG has a partition coefficient of roughly 3.2 to 3.4, far more moderate, so fat-soluble nutrients are not trapped and can repartition back into the gut lumen before being absorbed. That is a meaningful safety distinction.
The Calorie Counting Problem
The lawsuit gets at something more fundamental than whether David bars have good or bad ingredients. It exposes a real tension in how calorie counts are determined and verified.
Food manufacturers in the United States are permitted to calculate calories using the Atwater system, which assigns standard calorie values to macronutrients (4 calories per gram of protein and carbohydrates, 9 calories per gram of fat) and allows adjustments for ingredients that are not fully metabolized. This is how EPG ends up contributing only a fraction of the calories that regular fat would. The bomb calorimeter method, by contrast, measures total chemical energy and does not distinguish between what the body can and cannot use.
Registered dietitian Amy Goodson, quoted in NBC News coverage of the case, explained it clearly: “This ingredient allows you to actually put less fat grams on the food label itself, because it yields 92% less calories than a typical gram of fat would.” She also acknowledged the consumer confusion this creates. “We look at a nutrition facts label and assume that what’s on the label is what’s in the product,” she said.
Both of those things can be simultaneously true. The label can be FDA-compliant and based on real science, and still be confusing or counterintuitive for most people reading it.
Where EPG Stands Today
EPG adoption is still early-stage. Epogee LLC is the commercial rights holder, and the ingredient is positioned within the broader fat replacer market, estimated at $2.5 to $3.5 billion globally. The David Protein lawsuit, whatever its outcome, has done something no marketing campaign could have: it has put EPG in front of millions of consumers who had never heard of it.
There are real limitations worth noting. No long-term human safety data exists yet, only short-term studies. EPG has not received regulatory approval in the European Union. And because it is a chemically modified ingredient, it cannot qualify for “natural” labeling in most markets, which creates friction in an era dominated by clean-label consumer preferences.
Formulators also need to account for the fact that EPG can reduce the bioavailability of fat-soluble natural colorants and vitamins, since it acts as a partial lipid carrier in the gut. That is a real consideration for product development, even if the effect at typical serving sizes appears modest.
The Bigger Picture
The David lawsuit is less about one protein bar brand and more about where food innovation is heading. As protein obsession intensifies (the new U.S. dietary guidelines released in January 2026 emphasize protein at every meal), brands are under enormous pressure to deliver products that are simultaneously high in protein, low in calories, and actually palatable. EPG is one of the tools being deployed to thread that needle.
The science behind EPG is real, the safety data is more robust than most people realize, and the regulatory pathway it used is legitimate. But the lawsuit highlights that consumer trust is not built on regulatory compliance alone. When a bar labeled at 150 calories tests at 275 calories in an independent lab, even if the discrepancy is methodologically explainable, that explanation needs to be on the label in plain language, not buried in a food science defense strategy rolled out after a lawsuit is filed.
The food industry has been here before with Olestra. The lesson from that era was not just about GI side effects. It was about transparency. Ingredients that work differently from what consumers expect require clear communication upfront, not just technical compliance after the fact.