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Corn sugar is the monosaccharide glucose (more specifically its a specific stereoisomer of glucose called dextrose or D-glucose).[1] Cane sugar is sucrose, which is a disaccharide of composed of glucose and fructose.[2]
There is no way to enzymatically convert a monosaccharide to a disaccharide, you would need to be joining the glucose together with a fructose, which, as we are not fruit don't just have naturally occurring in our body.
When you eat sucrose, the enzyme sucrase-isomaltase located in the small intestine catalyzes its hydrolysis into fructose and glucose.[3,4] High-fructose corn syrup is a mixture of glucose and fructose which is exactly what you get when your body enzymatically breaks down sucrose.[5]
So corn sugar is glucose. Sugar can is sucrose. And high-fructose corn syrup is a mixture of "pre-digested" sucrose. I think that high-fructose corn syrup is probably bad in that its in everything and cheap, but I can't see how its any worse than regular sugar. And corn sugar is not the same as regular sugar, it lacks fructose entirely.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corn_sugar
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sugarcane
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sucrase
Fructose is a problem because it is processed as a toxin, in the liver. Fructose was invented by flowering plants in the early Cretaceous because, erg for erg, it tasted sweeter to insects. Our evolutionary ancestors never had need to evolve means to process much of it. The liver makes it into fat, wraps it in cholesterol, and ships it off to the fat cells to store, emitting lots of uric acid as waste. Too much uric acid causes lots of problems.
If production of cholesterol is inadequate, worse things happen.
Fructose is a minor problem if consumed along with enough fiber, because enough fiber delays absorption long enough for your intestinal bacteria to get a crack at it first. (They can eat fructose all day long.) But modern industrial "food" processing is all about eliminating fiber, and delivering the straight-up stuff. The only actual fruit without enough fiber is, oddly, grapes.
That's not true because about half of the carbs in fruits and vegetables is fructose. (Cherries have the lowest ratio I know about at about 30%; apples and pears have the highest at around 70%; most fruits and vegetable are almost exactly half fructose and half glucose.)
Also, if you eat a spaghetti meal or a lot of potatoes (which rapidly become glucose and get absorbed) your body will convert a decent amount of the glucose into fructose according to researcher Robert Lustig MD.
(I don't disagree with your overall point that most affluent people consume too much fructose. In the ancestral environment however calories were scarce enough that people should have and did eat almost all the fructose they could find.)
Your body has processes to produce fructose, which is then processed by the liver to fat for storage, when preparing for lean times seems indicated.
It is hard to research, but it seems like mangoes have the highest proportion of fructose. Honey has more fructose than glucose, and agave syrup is mostly fructose.
† Other sugars get used for functional reasons other than sweetening, of course.
There are other sugars, maltose, maltodextrin, [not lactose] with varying numbers of glucose molecules stitched end on end, collectively amyloses. With enough, it becomes starch.
There is also left-handed enantiomeric glucose, zero calories, expensive, and racemic glucose, 50% calories. The latter is made from raw chemicals. Guessing they make the former by feeding the latter to bugs and selling what is left over, although there are crystallization tricks.
I bake with corn sugar, and it works fine. I have found that hot chocolate made with it is unsatisfying without a half-teaspoon of table sugar added. Or a marshmallow.
Not so: lactose is a glucose stitched to a galactose molecule.
Sugar is certainly not good for you. The problem with HFCS is that it makes it cheap easy for the food industry to create hyperpalatable foods jacked with sugar. But choosing foods with "cane sugar" does nothing to improve health outcomes.
HFCS has the commercial benefit of being substantially cheaper than cane sugar, in part via massive subsidy by the US federal government, and in part because maize is so fantastically productive of starch cheap to convert to glucose and thence via chemical-engineered wizardry to fructose.
HFCS originated as a clever way to consume the massive influx of surplus maize produced by the Nixon adminstration's agricultural subsidies for mono-crop maize production instituted under Earl Butz, still in place. The public health catastrophe we still suffer is just an unfortunate side effect of the disproportionately representated rural voting bloc that keeps the subsidies in place.
in theory, but in practice there can be impurities from the production process, e.g. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00216-012-5817-x
Dicarbonyls are blamed for "obliterative bronchiolitic lung disease", which sounds unpleasant.
Technically, trans fats were supposed to be banned in US food, but major corporations get from the FDA a "temporary exception", year after year, to put it in anyway, with no requirement to reveal it as "trans fat" on the label. It has been well-known as a major cause of heart disease since the '70s, but took until late in the last decade to get (technically) banned.
In other words, hemlock and tobacco are toxic in very different ways and it's a bit strange to say one is more toxic than the other at all. Accidental tobacco poisoning is hardly a thing at all.
In a controlled educational setting a sample of both was pass around a crowd of about 25 people at different times, and the instructor asked if anybody detected a strong smell in either sample.
I found the smell of poison hemlock terrible, a kind of chemical souring sensation in the back of the nose, as did one or two others in the group.
The instructor highlighted that the ratio of people sensitive was typically the same in every group, then moved on to another topic.
This might be true for water hemlock as well, but I'm not going out of my way to find out.
I still identify wild carrot visually, but always do a sniff test as a final check.
Nicotine pouches were first sold in year 2008 according to Wikipedia.