In the anti-sugar video by Donald Lustig, pediatric endocrinologist, that's been posted here a million times, he says HFCS is no worse than sugar - they're both terrible for you in the quantities people consume these days. This makes sense because they're chemically essentially the same thing (sucrose is a disaccharide of glucose and fructose, whereas HFCS is mix of glucose and fructose monosaccharides in proportions that may slightly skew towards fructose or glucose depending on the formulation. The disaccharides of sucrose are broken up in the body anyway, so in the end there's no clinically significant difference. Lustig didn't think the difference was important).
If there's anything misleading going on here, it's that people think that "real" sugar is OK. I guess it'll give you natural diabetes.
The problem with HFCS isn't that it is necessarily worse than other forms of sugar. Rather, the problem is that it is usually an indicator of other problems. It's like Van Halen's famous brown M&Ms.
The band Van Halen had a term in their contracts, buried in the section of technical requirements that specified things like power requirements and structural requirements for the stage and such, that required the venue to provide a bowl of M&Ms for the band, with all the brown M&Ms removed.
This was there not because they had anything against brown M&Ms. Its purpose was to provide a way to see if someone had actually read the technical requirements. When they arrived to set up for a show, they could walk backstage, glance at the bowl of M&Ms, and if they saw brown ones, they invariably found on closer inspection that other requirements had also been ignored--including safety requirements.
Same with HFCS. If you find HFCS in the ingredient list, it is usually a sign you are dealing with a food that has had a lot of processing applied to it to try to "improve" it, or make it cheaper at the expense of nutrition, and so on. A food that has not been processed like that almost never will have HFCS.
Your comment is spot on. The rule of thumb is that if you can't make sense of the ingredients list on back labels (especially if they're extremely long), it's more than likely highly processed junk.
There are indeed people who will argue (with varying degrees of vehemence and research/evidence) that high fructose corn syrup is worse for you than sugar. However, some folks, myself included, simply think that high fructose corn syrup tastes (and feels) disgusting.
I read a book a few years ago called "Pure, white and deadly" by John Yudkin (first published in 1972) that still has an incredible amount of relevant information in it.
The main issue tends to come down to the mass production of food for consumption, and the market effects / economies of scale that it creates - the input to the digestive system changes rapidly, but the machinery is limited by the rate of human evolution.
If there's anything misleading going on here, it's that people think that "real" sugar is OK. I guess it'll give you natural diabetes.
Obligatory link to the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM