All the Free Phenylalanines You Can Drink

Free Drinks
In an effort to keep their geeks around the office more, and going home less, my work place offers all you can drink sodas in each of the kitchens. In each kitchen in each building, you'll find the same selection of sodas, fruit juices, sparkling waters, and milk. We also have these giant Starbucks machines that will freshly grind, over steep, and dispense a fresh steamy cup of mediocre Starbucks coffee in a minute for you. The beverage service is actually pretty cool, I really like it, and I take advantage of it a lot.

I learned a few years ago, however, that drinking 6 Mountain Dews a day, while it will drastically increase your productivity, is also a quick trip to fatty-ville. If you figure each Mountain Dew is about 200 calories of pure sugar (which it is) and you multiple that by 6, that's a full meal of empty calories for you to convert into lard. Years ago, therefore, I switched to diet sodas, and I've also cut back from 6 to a moderately disturbing 2 or 3 a day. My personal poison of choice is Cherry Diet Coke, because it's sweet enough to cover up that "Just for the taste of it" swill taste.

Phenylalanine
One day while I was sitting in my riveting daily meetings, chugging my third Cherry Diet Coke of the day, I noticed a line on the can that said "Phenylketonurics: contains phenylalanine". WTF, I thought? What is that stuff? I assume it must be great for me, if the FDA requires it's labeling on the side of products containing them.

A quick diversion; has anyone else noticed that chemical posts on Wikipedia were obviously written by people who know chemistry, for people who know chemistry? It can be really tough for my small brain to wade through one of those chemical posts.

But back to it: it turns out that phenylalanine is a naturally occurring amino acid that is one of the 20 amino acids our DNA uses to create proteins. It can also be metabolized into a couple of other amino acids we need. Phenylalanine is also used in sweeteners, like aspartame. Phenylketonuria is the inability to metabolize phenylalanine, a condition that affects in about 1 in 15,000 births worldwide. This is why, in the US and Canada, all products that contain aspartame, or Equal, or whatever, have to label their packaging with "Phenylketonurics: contains phenylalanine". It's because people with Phenylketonuria, abbreviated PKU, have to closely monitor their intake of protein, so as to avoid excessive amounts of phenylalanine.

Strangely, a type of monkey called a macaque recently had its genome sequenced, and it was found that they naturally have a mutation found in humans have PKU.

Macaque

Does this mean that all macaques are inable to drink Diet Coke? I hope not, because they already have quite enough stacked against them already.