The white powdered stuff you see in your sugar bowl at home is sucrose, a chemical combination of glucose (the sugar your body uses for energy) and fructose.
The sweetener mixed in soft drinks is known as high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS), a mixture of fructose and glucose. It is cheaper than sucrose and somewhat sweeter as well, but is digestively very similar.
Sucrose breaks down to glucose and fructose due to the digestive enzyme sucrase. Glucose is absorbed directly in the small intestines. Fructose, on the other hand, is unchanged by the digestive process and is taken up by the liver to be metabolized.
In the liver fructose is broken down into fatty acids, triglycerides, and VLDL–the “bad” cholesterol. The liver also metabolizes fructose into uric acid, an abundance of which can cause gout. Every 100 calories of HFCS consumed results in 40 calories of fat stored in the body.
After research, I’ve discovered that there really isn’t anything significantly different metabolically between chowing down on the sugar in the sugar bowl and drinking a cup of HFCS–they both contain similar levels of glucose and fructose.
While sugar is in many foods nowadays, HFCS is nearly everywhere–not just soda, but salad dressings, sauces, condiments, and almost all processed foods–because it’s cheap and can cover up the poor taste and quality of the other (cheap) ingredients.
