Megan Graham
David Protein stayed mostly quiet at first after a lawsuit accused it of understating its bars' calories and fat content in January. Then some Tiktokers started comparing themselves to Regina George.
"I just found out that they've been lying about the nutrition labels," one self-described David devotee said on TikTok earlier this month, more than a month after the suit was filed, as on-screen text proclaimed "I have been Regina Georged."
By invoking the character in the 2004 comedy "Mean Girls" who gets tricked into eating weight-gain bars, the TikTok post with 1.3 million views and others like it have turned the lawsuit's allegations into a meme.
That put David on the hunt for an equally effective retort, in a reminder how abruptly the narrative around a company can change when social media is at work and how hard it can be to respond.
"We live in a very dynamic, hyper-connected society that's high on speed and low on context, and so the narrative can get away from you incredibly quickly. And I believe that's what has happened to David in this instance," said Evan Nierman, founder and chief executive officer at crisis public relations firm Red Banyan. "They're also on the back foot because too many people believe that if you become the target of a lawsuit and allegations are made, then you must be guilty of something, and there has to be truth to it. But that's not the case."
Neither Nierman nor his firm are working with David.
David bars -- which say they contain 28 grams of protein and 150 calories -- gained popularity soon after their debut in fall 2024. Ads introducing the product implied that consumers would have to eat boiled cod to find a comparable protein-to-calorie ratio, and the company reinforced the point by eventually beginning to sell frozen cod filets. It further built its brand with grabby marketing like a pair of billboards that read "Men disappoint" and, next to the actress and model Julia Fox, "David satisfies."
In January, the company was named in a lawsuit by three plaintiffs claiming that independent testing showed the bars contained more calories and fat than shown on their nutrition labels. That got a mention in a Vanity Fair profile of co-founder and CEO Peter Rahal, but little more attention until this month.
Only once the lawsuit gained attention on social media did David get louder in its defense.
"No one is getting Regina Georged," the company wrote on social media, moving into an explanation of the right and wrong way to calculate food calories.
"First our strategy was like, 'Let's get the science down so people understand,'" Rahal said in an interview. Another one of David's responses features video commentary from Mitch Culler, research and development director at Epogee, the David subsidiary that makes the bars' star ingredient, a fat substitute called EPG.
But then David posted a humorous video of a sequence of people repeating bizarre rumors about David, a play on a scene from "Mean Girls" in which high-schoolers share increasingly absurd rumors about a fellow student. "Not all rumors are true," David's video concludes.
Rahal said the moment is giving the company an opportunity to be more educational about EPG.
"One of the silver linings is it is a big spotlight on energy, on calories, on nutrition, on EPG technology, and it's a good way to get the culture educated on it," Rahal said. "It's one positive, but man, anytime a reputation and the core of what we're about [is questioned], it's quite scary."
The details of David's defense don't travel through social media quite as easily as a "Mean Girls" reference alone.
The lab cited by the lawsuit reached its figures by using one method to analyze the amount of fat in food, along with what the food world calls the Atwater factors, which estimate calories based on the amount of protein, fat and carbohydrates in a product.
David says that doesn't work for its bars because they include a fat substitute called EPG that isn't absorbed by the body like real fat is and thus contributes fewer calories in food than real fat would.
"The claims in this lawsuit are meritless and reflect a fundamental misunderstanding of basic, well-established scientific principles regarding how calories are determined under U.S. nutrition-labeling standards for ingredients like EPG," Rahal said in a statement. "David Protein stands firmly behind the accuracy of its labeling and will vigorously defend it." The company also plans to ask that the suit be dismissed.
EPG isn't susceptible to bodies' fat-digesting enzymes, said Debbie Fetter, an associate professor of teaching in the nutrition department at the University of California, Davis.
"Most of it doesn't get metabolized, meaning that we don't extract energy from it, and it passes through and is excreted in the stool," Fetter said.
Measuring the precise amount of calories in a product with an ingredient such as EPG would require knowing the quantities of all the ingredients in the product, said Fetter, who isn't involved in the David suit.
The Food and Drug Administration didn't respond to a request for comment on how food companies should accurately measure the calories in EPG on nutrition labels. The attorney for the plaintiffs didn't return a request for comment.
Nierman said he would like to see David streamline its argument for consumers who might not understand more complicated, scientific-sounding explanations. Third-party experts with high credibility could help reinforce its points, he said.
"I do think that they have a lot of arguments on their side," Nierman said. "I just think they need to be more effective at explaining the science in a way that can be swallowed up by the masses."
"The irony, of course," he added, is that one ingredient isn't digestible, "but their arguments need to be easily digested."
Write to Megan Graham at megan.graham@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
March 23, 2026 20:38 ET (00:38 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2026 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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