Both honey and high fructose corn syrup are > 85% water, fructose, and glucose in ratios similar enough to not make a difference.

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.

Well, to be fair, the remaining few percent of honey has some ridiculously fancy enzyme action going on, an eminently plausible mechanism for inducing protective benefits and anecdotally suspected of being vaguely beneficial to health.

Health-wise, I know which one I would be reaching for first if I needed to treat a wound. I haven't yet heard of medical grade HFCS. http://cid.oxfordjournals.org/content/46/11/1677.full

Late to the party, but...

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...

There are some significant problems drawing conclusions from that study about what you should eat.

* 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.