David Gets Its Day in Court

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A federal lawsuit now challenging David Protein’s labeling claims is forcing a bigger question into the open: what exactly is a nutrition label supposed to measure?

Three consumers brought the complaint, along with lab results from Anresco Laboratories, an accredited testing facility, showing the bars contained between 268 and 275 calories per serving, despite labels listing 150. The same testing found between 11 and 13.5 grams of fat, versus the 2 to 2.5 grams stated on the wrapper, depending on flavor.

The interesting part of this story is not the size of the gap. It is the reason the gap may exist at all.

The dispute revolves around esterified propoxylated glycerol, or EPG, a modified fat designed to mimic the texture and function of fat while contributing far fewer absorbed calories. Instead of the usual 9 calories per gram of fat, EPG is estimated to provide only about 0.7 calories per gram because much of it passes through the body undigested.

We broke down the science of EPG back in August. The short version: it is built to preserve the sensory benefits of fat without delivering the full metabolic cost.

That sounds straightforward enough, until you ask the question this lawsuit is really about: What exactly is a nutrition label supposed to describe?

David’s position is that nutrition labels should reflect what the body actually absorbs. By that logic, EPG should not be treated like ordinary fat, because it does not behave like ordinary fat metabolically. Founder Peter Rahal told reporters the lawsuit “fails to understand how the FDA measures the calories for EPG,” and the company has said it intends to defend its labeling vigorously.

The lawsuit takes the opposite view. Its argument is that whatever EPG does in the body, it is still chemically a fat-like substance and should be counted accordingly under existing FDA labeling rules. The complaint points to the FDA’s written definition of total fat as the weight of all lipid fatty acids expressed as triglycerides. Under that interpretation, what matters is not just how much energy your body absorbs, but what is physically present in the product.

That is what makes this case so interesting. It is not simply asking whether David overstated its macros or whether plaintiffs found a discrepancy in the lab. It is asking whether labels should describe chemical composition or metabolizable impact when those two things no longer line up neatly.

For ordinary foods, that difference is small enough that most people never think about it. For engineered ingredients like EPG, it suddenly matters a lot.

David’s position here is even more notable because it controls Epogee, the sole source of EPG. In other words, the company isn’t just interpreting the ingredient aggressively, it also controls access to it.

The obvious version of this story is that a startup with suspiciously good macros may have pushed too far.

The more interesting version is that modern food science is beginning to outgrow the assumptions built into nutrition labeling.

For decades, labels mostly worked because foods were relatively boring. Fat was fat. Carbs were carbs. A gram on paper usually mapped reasonably well to what people expected it to mean in the body. But novel ingredients are changing that. Companies are increasingly engineering around old nutritional tradeoffs:

EPG is not the end of this trend. It is probably the beginning.

What this lawsuit exposes is that nutrition labels may now be trying to do two jobs at once: tell you what is physically in the product, and tell you what your body is expected to absorb. With conventional foods, those answers are close enough that the distinction barely matters. With engineered ingredients, they can diverge dramatically.

That creates a weird triangle where scientific truth, regulatory truth, and consumer understanding may all point in slightly different directions.

David could be right in a practical sense that EPG contributes fewer usable calories than ordinary fat. The plaintiffs could still be right in a legal sense that current labeling rules require it to be counted differently. And consumers could still walk away misled if the package communicates one thing while the product is built on a more complicated interpretation most buyers would never know to question.

Brands like David sell precision. They sell optimization. They sell the promise that the numbers on the wrapper are meaningful enough to build a diet around.

That is why this dispute matters more than it would for an ordinary snack brand. For brands selling optimization, the numbers are the product.

And there is a second issue here that goes beyond compliance: satiety and consumer expectations. Even if an ingredient contributes fewer metabolizable calories, that does not necessarily mean consumers experience the product the way the label implies. A bar containing a large amount of fat-like material may still eat, digest, or feel more like a richer product than the listed macros suggest. People are not just buying theoretical absorbed calories. They are buying a food, and expecting the label to describe it in a way that makes intuitive sense.

Consumers tend to assume every Nutrition Facts panel is speaking the same language. As ingredients become more engineered, that assumption gets harder to defend.

The real issue here is not whether EPG is “fake fat,” or whether David is uniquely deceptive. It is that the old nutrition-label framework was built for conventional foods, and food innovation is now stress-testing that framework in public.

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