> Can somebody help me understand how sugar in orange juice is somehow magically healthier than sugar in soda? As far as I know, it's all just glucose and fruct

> Can somebody help me understand how sugar in orange juice is somehow magically healthier than sugar in soda? As far as I know, it's all just glucose and fructose. Reductionist reasoning in a complex system is extremely dangerous. Eg: fruits have sugar mixed in with a lot of fiber. Therefore, the rate at which glucose enters the bloodstream (and the resulting insulin profile) is very different compared to a orange juice or a soda. Taking a step back, the simplest forms of cooking / food processing that humans have done throughout history is by applying physical transformation on food while leaving underlying chemicals mostly invariant. If that did not affect the biochemistry, then food processing would be basically pointless. That wasn’t all done for taste! It is hopelessly naive to believe that biochemistry of a complex organism could be reduced to chemistry of simple constituents like glucose without any regard to context (conditions and other constituents).