The Plastic Lurking in Your ‘Perfect’ Protein Bar

Living with Crohn’s disease means I’ve spent over a decade trying to manage inflammation while maintaining an active lifestyle. Like a canary in a coal mine, my body is extremely sensitive to hard-to-pronounce ingredients lurking in food to the stress of the environmental load from the world around us. As both an athlete and someone who runs a gluten-free bakery, I’m constantly navigating between optimal nutrition and convenient fuel sources, so the idea of a “perfect” protein bar from David had me interested. I didn’t realize that their desire to deliver a bar with very little fat (to keep the protein ratio high) would have me spending hours researching one ingredient that pulls together two of the trendiest topics in health right now — the ubiquity of microplastics and the dangers of ultra-processed foods.

So much of my thinking and writing is devoted to protein and how the building blocks, amino acids, are important for every process in the body. Dysfunctional protein synthesis can lead to inflammation (and for me an autoimmune cascade) so I’m definitely in the camp of most people — particularly active people — are getting less than optimal amounts. Eating enough high-quality protein can feel like too much, and may be difficult for some, so there has been an explosion in snacks and supplements centered around protein.

Chances are, you’re currently eating some combination of nut bars or milks, collagen, meat sticks, protein shakes, and plant-based meat replacements. I have a multi-collagen powder every day, as well as an amino acid powder, and if I’m training, I’m likely snacking on something protein related, even if my diet is 90% whole foods. So when one of my running newsletters (and later podcasts and ads following me around the internet) started promoting the “perfect” protein bar, started by the founder of RxBar, known for their simple, whole ingredient approach, I was curious.

David Protein is literally evoking the image of the statue as the model of the perfect man and promoting 28g of protein for just 150 calories with no sugar and features flavors like Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough, Red Velvet and Peanut Butter Chocolate Chunk. David boasts that 75% of the calories come from protein. Their “Protein System” includes egg white powder, collagen, whey, and milk protein isolate — a combination I certainly get in products I buy and eat during training. The “Flavor System” is doing a lot of sugar-like chemistry, but uses some things we use for our keto goods at Switch Bakery, like allulose. I’m not a fan of sugar alcohols, but David’s combination does give them the ability to say “zero added sugars” and keeps the calories typically associated with sugar out of the equation.

The “Fat System” is where my spidey-senses started going haywire. Having been actively working to boost my body’s ability to prefer fat to carbs for fuel for the last ten years, I don’t really shy away from fat as long as it’s from healthy sources like avocado, coconut, butter, or olive oil. David lists coconut oil along with something called “modified plant fat (EPG)”, stating that this is the key to their product with the mouthfeel and satisfaction associated with fat in foods, but it is not digestible and passes through the body with no caloric hit.

In the videos on the website, trusted longevity and health celebrities Dr. Peter Attia and Dr. Andrew Huberman (who are also investors) talk about the advantage of this highly processed rapeseed oil product as if were transformed biochemically into something almost healthy. The video talks about how this converted fat molecule is immune to the body’s ability to break it into fatty acids (via enzymes), passing through your digestive system just like any other undigestible solid — like insoluble fiber — which is supposed to make us believe EPG could be good for us, or at worst, not bad for us.

When a product emphasizes that you can eat it with no digestive issues, I get immediately suspicious (if it were so innocuous, why are you bringing it up?), so I decided to do some research to try and understand how EPG is made.

Digging deeper into EPG, I found that it was originally developed by Arco Chemical Company in the 1980s and explored for products in the 90s during the same era that gave us olestra, another non-digestible fat substitute. While olestra needed a vitamin boost because it interfered with nutrient absorption, EPG was engineered to avoid those problems. Despite the low-fat food craze, foods with EPG never materialized — likely due to the disaster pants problems people experienced by eating too many chips made with olestra. Fast-forward almost thirty years and the technology was acquired and resurrected by Choco Finesse, LLC (now, Epogee, LLC) who were looking to tap into the current obesity and weight loss concerns by focusing on how the fat helps you reduce calories.

Olestra isn’t just a cousin to EPG; based on FDA documents, Epogee avoided the FDA’s strict food additive approval process altogether by pursuing GRAS status — a common industry shortcut that lets companies determine their own ingredients are “Generally Recognized as Safe” based on similarity to existing ingredients (like P&G’s Olean) and paid expert opinions. Unlike FDA approval, which requires specific safety studies and pre-market review, GRAS ingredients enter our food supply with essentially no direct FDA oversight. EPG rode into the market (like over 10,000 other ingredients) on the coattails of decades of fat substitutes, with the company itself deciding it was safe enough for our bodies.

What makes me uncomfortable is how EPG is created. The “modified plant fat” marketing hides the reality that it’s made by reacting glycerol with propylene oxide, a petroleum-derived chemical produced by Dow that is classified as a probable human carcinogen by the International Agency for Research on Cancer. The final EPG product is tested to ensure only trace amounts (<1 ppm) of propylene oxide remain, but this volume is in the range of microplastic particles found in various organs across multiple studies. It feels disingenuous to market EPG as some kind of healthy plant-based innovation when it’s fundamentally another petrochemical mutation that has made it into our food supply with no one sounding the alarm.

With nutrition marketing, we’ve given our diet over to better living through chemistry, and while everyone is pointing to the shining ideal macros, they are sneaking toxins, known carcinogens, and plastics into our everyday food. According to the FDA approval, EPG in snack foods and baked goods can make up to 30% of the content. Currently, there are only a few products using EPG for ice cream, protein bars, chocolate, and nut butters, the “healthy” optics are sure to take off thanks to the scientific blessing of some of the most popular doctors on the Internet. This last point is the most depressing. While I know these guys are in the public eye to make money, they are also feeding us hours of content about how to eliminate microplastics, avoid junky science, and potentially destructive marketing claims about highly processed foods.

The irony is that in a recent video with Michael Easter, author of The Scarcity Brain and The Comfort Crisis, about the dangers of ultra-processed foods, Peter Attia explains the food industry’s “three V’s of snacking”: Value, Variety (multiple flavors), and Velocity (fast to eat). David’s protein bars hit all these same markers, making it a bit disingenuous (from my point of view) positioning them as something made for your health in mind: “Designed for the human body”.

Getting enough protein is vital (and becomes more difficult as we age), and while marketers are keying into this with convenient protein sources, we shouldn’t trade our health for their convenience. Four ounces of just about any protein, four eggs, or a cup of cottage cheese (Good Culture makes my favorite) will get you to 28 grams of protein from a whole food source. Air-dried, grass-fed jerky, like that from Brooklyn Biltong, delivers the same 28 grams of protein (with only 30 more calories) as David bars and fits easily in your jersey pocket or purse. Even Maui Nui venison sticks, another product promoted by the likes of Dr. Peter Attia, Dr. Huberman, and Tim Ferriss, can easily get you there without petroleum-processed fats and FDA loopholes. Those of us with autoimmune conditions have a heightened sensitivity, often with an immediate response to potentially harmful ingredients, and like canaries in a coal mine, we can be an early warning system to what’s lurking in our increasingly “perfectly engineered” food supply.