Comment by Centigonal

It's more complicated than that.

Many foods in the United States are sweetened with high fructose corn syrup (which is very cheap compared to cane sugar because growing corn is very cheap in the United States because of climate, infrastructure, and extensive government subsidies). In soft drinks, the syrup is roughly 55% fructose, 45% glucose.

Table sugar is usually sucrose, which is a compound sugar (disaccharide) comprised of one fructose and one glucose molecule. In many bottled soft drinks, the low pH of the beverage hydrolyzes the sucrose into its component sugars, resulting in a solution of 50% fructose and 50% glucose.

Chemically, we're comparing a 55/45 mixture of fructose and glucose to a 50/50 mixture of fructose and glucose. HFCS has become a bogeyman in American society, but evidence since the 1980s seems to show that, when it comes to soda, the excess fructose isn't nearly as bad as the whole "recreationally drinking 40g of instantly available sugar" part.

Mexican coke does taste different, but it may have more to do with the other flavorants and the bottling process than the source of the sugar.

Here's a fantastic video about this all: https://www.pbs.org/video/everyone-is-wrong-about-mexican-co...

Edit: I found a cool 2014 study that actually assayed the sugar content in various soda pop brands: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S089990071...

Looks like some HFCS-sweetened soda pop has up to a 70/30 fructose/glucose ratio. It's also worth noting that corn syrup contains maltose and various polysaccharides not present in table sugar, but I think most of that is refined out in colas, since there only seems to be 1% maltose present in the colas analyzed by this paper.