Very fair point. I guess I've been exposed to too many paleo "all sugar is equally evil" bros lately. They can certainly science with the rest of them.
Hell, Kary Mullis won a Nobel for inventing PCR which he practically did from his surf board. Although his later absurdity^ re: AIDS / Astrology / Climate Change might give some more credence to keeping the bros out of science ;-)
^Absurdity not absurdism
Unless something in the remaining few percent is protective for honey and or harmful for HFCS, it's doubtful that there's a difference health-wise.
There does seem to be a difference between honey and refined sugar that is worth noting. This study compared rats eating lots of starch, glucose + fructose or honey: http://jn.nutrition.org/content/132/11/3379.full.pdf+html
This blogpost displays some of its data in nice, colorful bar charts: http://blog.cholesterol-and-health.com/2010/10/high-fructose...
* The study was done on rats
* n=9/group
* They used fructose/glucose from a laboratory supplier, not HFCS from a supplier used by food manufacturers
* They fed the rats 100% starch/fructose+glucose/honey and vitamins (real people have varied diets)
The conclusions you should draw are that A) eating a diet of 100% HCFS is probably a bad thing (duh) and B) honey has antioxidants.
So if you replace your HFCS with honey, you don't need to get as many antioxidants from other sources.
Were they to control for antioxidant content, this study might be a bit more interesting.
And besides, who says a "bro" can't science? ;)