EPG - David is Goliath now
On my corner of the internet, and spilling over into some more mainstream health and wellness areas, the relatively new and wildly successful David protein bar brand has been making waves.
One of their ingredients that has led to their impressive protein to calorie ratio (28g:150cals) is something called EPG, or Esterified Propoxylated Glycerol. Yeah, EPG makes it sound much more palatable.
There’s a few different conversations going on:
Natural vs Processed debate. In one camp we have folks who view this ingredient as a processed abomination, sprouted from the oil and gas industry and engineered as part of the Big Food agenda. On the other side we have folks who are excited about this innovation and the great macro’s and taste they can get with it.
David buying Epogee, the owner of EPG, and stopping other brands from accessing it. There’s now a lawsuit pending. Savvy business move? Or illegal monopoly?
I built a science based brand over ~8 years, and realized that if I actually just read the papers I might be able to help with the first debate. I have no idea about monopolies law, but it certainly seems like a shrewd business decision to buy a key supplier for your brand and the category at large.
FDA rules: GRAS
To understand how safe EPG is for consumption, you first need to know a thing or two about the way the FDA works. In the USA, we have a system called “Generally Regarded as Safe” or GRAS for short. If you want to put a new ingredient in the food system, you have to do some research on it, convene an expert panel and submit all of the evidence plus their testimony for the FDA to review. Crucially, and perhaps differently to other countries, the FDA does not do any of their own testing here. They can ask questions, and ask for more research, but they are not checking the fats with independent research.
EPG History
EPG has been around since the early 1990s. Fat in food was Enemy #1 at that time, and things like margarine were getting pushed into the mainstream by the big food companies.
It lost steam until someone picked it up again in the 2010’s and put in the work to get it certified as GRAS. Once it’s GRAS, food brands can use it in their products without doing any of their own testing on it.
EPG Studies
In 2014, Choco Finesse the owner of the IP paid for contract researchers and consultants to carry out the research to get it a greenlight from the FDA. That year there was a flurry of studies, mostly on animals. They checked for:
Genotoxicity - aka will it mess with our genes/DNA?
Toxicity - aka if we take this in high doses over long periods of time, will it poison us?
Reproduction study - aka will it mess with our next generation if we eat it today?
Developmental study - kind of the same but specific to mother and fetus
These tests were all on rats, micropigs and rabbits. No humans yet.
Then they had their human study. How was it? Well, pretty solid I’d say. Let’s take a look.
Sample size was good at 139 participants.
Double-Blind RCT also which is the gold standard for this.
They tested people across 4 different variables for 8 weeks:
0g per day (the control group)
10g/day
25g/day
40g/day
Blood levels of fat soluble vitamins were reported in normal range, there were no significant adverse events throughout the 8 week study.
4 people dropped out of the study due to GI discomfort, 3 of them were taking EPG, 1 was in the control group. A bunch more dropped out for various personal reasons (travel etc.) so in the end only 103 data points made it into the analysis.
The tl;dr of the study is: EPG is safe to consume, but if you’re eating a lot of it (25g+ / day) you may start getting some GI symptoms, especially if you’re a woman. The 7 they called out were: “gas with discharge; diarrhea; oily spotting; oily evacuation; oily stool; liquid stool; soft stool.” Fun stuff.
They did one more safety study on humans, this time steadily increasing the dose from 0g up to 150g/day of EPG. Each dose was on a single day, then they did a 2 day washout before the next dose, going up in 30g increments. This one had fewer side effects reported than the prolonged study. Generally an increase in farting when you consume EPG was observed. But other than one poor participant who pooped 10 times in one day after eating 150g of EPG, there wasn’t much else to report on from the study.
And that’s it! That’s all the human data on EPG it takes to get the FDA to sign off and now I suspect millions of us have eaten it.
Scientifically speaking, these studies seem to be thorough and well designed. The biggest flaw is that the research is sponsored by the folks who stand to profit from selling the product. I couldn’t find any studies not sponsored by companies involved in selling EPG (if you find one, please let me know so I can review and update this post).
What about David?
So just to get a quick reference point, David’s website currently suggests maxing out at 2 bars/day
Screenshot of David website, captured 6/5/2025
One bar contains 1.5g of total fat, 1g of that is saturated. The fat system is just EPG and coconut oil, and commercial EPG is likely all saturated fat. So let’s just say there’s about 1g of EPG per bar. Seems well within the tolerated range and well below the threshold for people in the study to get the GI effects.
Nutrition facts screen-grabbed from David website 6/5/2025
I have 3 viewpoints:
As a scientist, I'd love to see more human studies, even just one or two attempts to reproduce the results of the first one. Who would pay for those? I don’t know… maybe some of the folks who are vehemently anti-EPG? I’d love to see more studies coming out from the makers of EPG too, but it’s likely that future studies would focus on the benefits of their product now that they have achieved GRAS status and it’s in the market.
As a consumer, I always flip things over and read the ingredients / look at the nutrition fact panel. What David has achieved from a macro’s standpoint while making it taste as good as other protein bars is very compelling. 28g of protein for 150 calories is impressive. I’ve tried a few flavors, and I didn’t experience any adverse events. I thought it tasted similar to other bars. But the numbers are next level. I don’t love being a guinea pig for novel ingredients though, so it won’t be in my regular rotation.
As a brand builder, I see a clear play to the mass market. And I think it will continue to crush. What I learned building my brand was that each category has a few clear drivers. In protein bars, the macro’s and the taste are where you win and lose in the mass market. There will be winners crowned that have a more natural ingredient list and appeal to the subset of consumers who care about that (I generally prefer to play here). But David made a clear choice when they switched to Ace-K and Sucralose for their sweetener system. Artificial sweeteners are cheaper, and taste good to the majority of consumers. This brand will be in every gas station, C store, supermarket and beyond. The average American wants to lose a little fat, gain a little muscle and probably isn’t tallow-maxxing. So David will do well.