I don't live in a high corn syrup economy. I'm not exposed to the risk as much, I'd be blovating to say much here.
I also wonder if the artificial sweeteners are bad, precisely because of biomimcry: Fooling the body into thinking it's ingested sugar could have perverse outcomes.
If you're going to be making comparisons like this, you should be clear about which HFCS you're referring to. Is it HFCS 55, which is 5% higher in fructose than sucrose is? Or is it HFCS 42, which is 8% lower? If you look this up online, you'll see it summarized roughly as "food: HFCS 42, soda: HFCS 55". If that's the case: none of this matters; caloric soft drinks are poison regardless of how you sweeten them.
I don’t think they are chemically identical because at a minimum I’ve seen the result of freeze drying solutions of both and HFCS is liquid at STP while sucrose is solid.
So if you’re going to make the argument that they are metabolically identical then go for it but be honest about what you are saying. They may be chemically similar, but so is cellulose.
I mean ... is this serious? "Chemically identical" means something meaningful, but "from the standpoint of human metabolism" does some heavy lifting. If you had said "from the standpoint of our current incomplete understanding of human metabolism" then fine. When you say "the only difference" do you mean "the only different in the way they are metabolized" or do you mean "the only chemical difference"?
In short I think our understanding of human metabolism and especially long-term adaptation of metabolic pathways to diet is extremely poorly understood and I would be wary before accepting any blanket statements about where the truth lies.
There are certainly papers in animals about preferences between sucrose and HFCS, for example [1], and just looking at the references indicate a number of human tests of a similar nature.
I don't think the question is whether we can taste the difference or which one we prefer when blinded, or whether the difference in taste is consistent between people or stable for an individual. The question is if there are latent health issues associated with them, and I think the jury is still out; it's very hard to do large scale studies on long-term effects of these things because they can't be done in a controlled way. Many would argue that writ large we have undergone a significant study across the population of the United States and the results don't look great, although there are a ton of confounding variables.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00319...