All of that is fine and well. The source of my skepticism is that I think there's a big leap to make between, "studies that are laser focused on the metabolic e

All of that is fine and well. The source of my skepticism is that I think there's a big leap to make between, "studies that are laser focused on the metabolic effects of fructose find that it's metabolized differently from glucose", and "fructose consumption is the primary cause of a major public health event." There's a whole chain of cause and effect that needs to be established to get there. The first link in that chain might be very strong indeed, but the rest of the links seem to be, judging by the information I'm aware of, somewhere between weak and nonexistent. Here's a good satirical paper aimed at illustrating the dangers of trying to extrapolate large-scale effects from a constellation of individual metabolic effects: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3001541/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3001541/