(The key thing to remember is that sugar is bad for you; it's not that HFCS is good, but rather that cane sugar is just as harmful.)
Two fun additional notes:
* There's a video somewhere showing how cane sugar breaks down into fructose and glucose in bottled sodas anyways, and
* Perhaps unsurprisingly, taste testers can't reliably distinguish between HFCS and cane sugar formula Coke.
Yes, sugar breaks down to the same fructose and glucose proportion.
That takes months. Even longer in concentrated syrup form. Even longer in the one of two components that bottlers get to make the syrup.
A freshly bottled coke in a glass bottle still has the undivided sucrose and that is why it tastes more crisp. After a while, it separates and it doesn’t taste any better because it physically isn’t different.
A freshly bottled HFCS coke still tastes fresh in all other respects, but is essentially stale on day one as far as the sweetener goes.
But by far the best is a properly calibrated soda machine with fresh syrup— but it’s only really fresh if it is sucrose. Otherwise it’s basically stale before you even make it.
The half-life of sucrose in coke under good storage conditions is ~2 weeks[0]. Modestly higher temperatures, such as during transport, reduces that to hours. The internet suggests that that coke is typically consumed 4-12 weeks after manufacturing, depending on the supply chain. Even in the most optimistic scenario, no more than 25% of the sucrose remains when you drink it. Realistically, it will round to 0%. Almost no one has drank a coke that still had sucrose in it.
The process is slower than enzymatic catalysis in the body (seconds to minutes) but still quite fast.
[0] I used an LLM to run the math but the result passes a cursory eyeball test.
The half-life of sucrose is greatly reduced by acidity and to a lesser extent temperature. It is stable for centuries in a neutral pH when kept cool but that describes almost nothing we do with sugar in foods.
You can get the US formula coke with cane sugar during Passover in markets with a high Jewish population. Taste it, it'll be practically the same as HFCS US Coke and not like Mexican Coke. Because, it has the same amount of salt as the US variety.
We have shaped our food culture in a way to maximize short term profit at the expense of making everyone fat and disabled longer term.
That sounds pretty major. You can be not in the slightest bit obese and the blood sugar spikes will still be bad for your brain, your insulin regulation, etc as far as I understand it.
Sucrose is 50% fructose.
HFCS is ~42-55% fructose. Its "high fructose" compared to just straight corn syrup, which is 0% fructose (practically pure glucose).
I pointed it out because its often used instead of sugar for cost reasons.
So in theory an extremely fresh mexican coke might be different, but in practice you're getting the same thing.
Excessive consumption of fructose leads to fatty liver and is just generally bad for you.
And that's absolutely true. I think it's easy to hate (more) on HFCS because it literally says "high fructose" in it, and thus easy to come to that conclusion.
When corn starch is processed, the produced syrup is nearly 100% glucose. Because fructose tastes sweeter, lots of corn syrup is further processed, converting much of the glucose into fructose, hence the name high fructose corn syrup.