is there any actual truth that real sugar is not as bad as HFCS? If I drink an american coke every day am I really worse off than if I have the cane sugar coke?

No. They're metabolically equivalent. "High fructose" corn syrup is "high" relative to normal corn syrup, not relative to sugar, some of the HFCS formulae in packaged food has less fructose than table sugar, and, most importantly, your body is a well-oiled machine at breaking down sucrose, which is cleaved enzymatically immediately upon it entering your gut; there's no material slowdown in digestion from eating sucrose.

(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.

I don't think so. I've seen things that say fructose has worse effects than sucrose in terms of spiking your blood sugar or whatever but that's minor compared to the overall impact of any sugar. Sugar is sweet because we were once starving beasts and calories were good. Now it's a hazard. And corn syrup gets dumped into all kinds of processed foods in the US because of how cheap it is, and how much people like sweet stuff.

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.

I'm unaware of any large scale studies on this topic. Both are pretty bad health-wise and should be avoided in regular large doses by anyone regardless.

I pointed it out because its often used instead of sugar for cost reasons.

I remember watching a video (something like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NY66qpMFOYo, but probably not that exact one) where they did the analysis and determined that Mexican cane-sugar coke contains the exact same proportion of sugars as HFCS coke - and it's because of the chemistry of how the sugars break apart in the presence of acid in the liquid.

So in theory an extremely fresh mexican coke might be different, but in practice you're getting the same thing.

Not really other than the micronutrient dimension which is not relevant in most commercial preparations. What matters most is the other stuff you're having it with. You want to have fiber _at the same time_ as refined carbs/any kind of sugar/jaggery/honey/palm sugar/... In a coke you're just getting sugar and water which is terrible.

Yes, you get pure fructose which is processed by your liver. With normal sugar you get a mix of fructose and sucrose, so less fructose.

Excessive consumption of fructose leads to fatty liver and is just generally bad for you.