exasperation

The big picture stuff you’re saying is all correct, but some of the details are wrong.

The only difference between the glucose in cane sugar and typical corn syrup and the fructose in High Fructose Corn Syrup is that fructose is a larger more complex molecule, tastes sweeter, and might absorb slower in your digestive tract (which as arguably better for your blood sugar and calorie intake).

Cane sugar is sucrose, a disaccharide that consists of one glucose and one fructose bound together into a single molecule. Note that the bond between the glucose half and the fructose half breaks down in acid, so acidic sweetened beverages (most sodas) tend to have a lot of glucose and fructose molecules sloshing around even if they were sweetened with sucrose. Either way, once eaten, the stomach acid will separate the glucose part from the fructose part.

Sucrose is equally as sweet as a 50/50 mixture of glucose and fructose. Glucose is less sweet than sucrose, and fructose is more sweet than sucrose, so syrups that have more fructose are more sweet per unit weight of sugar.

Fructose is also sent down a different metabolic pathway as glucose, so high fructose consumption can cause issues in some people. That said, because fructose is so sweet, and is pretty much half of table sugar/cane sugar/beet sugar/maple syrup. Most honeys are higher in fructose than glucose, but it depends on the source of the honeybee’s nectar, and most producers intend to produce higher fructose honey because higher fructose ratios do not crystallize as easily. And crystallization is bad for packing, processing, shipping, marketing, etc.

fructose is a larger more complex molecule

No, it’s the exact same molecular weight, with the exact same elements, C6H12O6, just arranged and bound differently.

In the US, “organic” comes with a whole bunch of regulations for compliance with the standards.

I like the lore that French food sucked until Catherine de Medici married the crown Prince of France and brought an entourage of cooks from Florence. It’s greatly overstated by Italians, but it’s still funny.

Well Ariely didn’t become a celebrity until these studies turned him into a rockstar in the academic economics world. So it seems to me to be more along the lines of him having been faking it the whole time, rather than trying to maintain momentum from an early success.

This headline and article misrepresent the study’s findings, and overstate the evidence for its conclusions. From the abstract, by the study’s actual author:

Single women’s marriage/cohabitation rates rise by 29 percentage points and employment among baseline non-employed women rises 27 percentage points after six or more quarters. Existing partnerships do not dissolve, and already-employed women show no upward job mobility. The pattern suggests that part of the female obesity penalty operates at new-match formation rather than only through health or incumbent productivity.

As the overwhelming majority of women in the labor force are actually employed, an effect that is seen only on the unemployed may not be appropriate to extrapolate across the entire population.

In another longitudinal study, also published by the NBER, reports a slight trend that already-employed women have a slight drop in employment when going on GLP-1s, and when evaluated over the entire population, the study’s authors conclude that GLP-1s do not have a meaningful effect on employment rates.

Overall, the evidence is much, much weaker than the article’s tone suggests.