ACK! Death by sugar.

Granted, what you say is technically true because you are hedging it with the word "contains". But it's misleading for two reasons:

(1) In America today, the lion's share of sugar in sodas comes from fructose, which in turn comes from high-fructose corn syrup. Fructose is a monosaccharide.

(2) I explicitly talked about long saccharide chains. The longest polysacccharide that sodas contain in nontrivial quantities is succhrose, a disaccharide. Far from being the "long saccharide chains" I talked about, disaccharides are as short as saccharide chains can get and still be chains. (They consist of two saccharides, as the prefix "di" indicates.) To suggest that glucose is covered under my second point is a stretch---figuratively and literally.

True, and besides the percentage of polysaccharides in high-fructose-corn-syrup is very small. But the point of posting a link to Edgar's thread was to link to articles showing that fructose in fruits - while necessarily identical to fructose of any other origin at the molecular level - comes bound to additional chemicals which cause our bodies to metabolize it differently. All sugars aren't the same when it comes to metabolic processes.

Sorry (also - I think - on behalf of Thomas) for this technical digression. The answer to your question (Thomas can correct this if too simplistic) is this: simple sugars (fructose, glucose, galactose etc) all share the same equation, C6H12O6, but the atoms are organized differently. To see what each of these sugars looks like enter its name in the search box here: http://www.wolframalpha.com/

These simple sugars combine to form longer chains; a simple one is sucrose (table sugar) composed of C12H22O11. You can look it up at the same link - it's one glucose molecule bound to one fructose molecule. After that it gets a bit complicated, because sugars in fruits arrive bound with additional chemicals (flavonoids) that the other sugars lack. Our bodies can process those without a problem - use as criterion: can diabetics eat fruit? Yes. The molecules of sucrose aren't bound to these chemicals but at least they're bound tightly together so they're not too damaging to our bodies unless we are diabetics. Finally: the sugar molecules in HFCS, while also composed of fructose-glucose in the approximate percentages of sucrose (and most fruits) are only bound together very loosely. Such molecular bonds aren't found in nature - they are manufactured in a lab, and our bodies have trouble processing the fructose that comes with them. Link to long video explaining in detail: http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2010/08/sugar-the-bitter-truth/

P.S. sorry in effort to be brief omitted a very important item: fructose is only found in nature bound with lots of fiber (e.g. sugar cane is a solid stick) and that's why fruits and vegetables (loaded with fiber) are good for us but their juices (even before adding extra sugars) aren't. Free fructose is a poison.