alt Hacker NewsI have a theory on this.
Yes, sugar breaks down to the same fructose and glucose proportion.
That takes months. Even longer in concentrated syrup form. Even longer in the one of two components that bottlers get to make the syrup.
A freshly bottled coke in a glass bottle still has the undivided sucrose and that is why it tastes more crisp. After a while, it separates and it doesn’t taste any better because it physically isn’t different.
A freshly bottled HFCS coke still tastes fresh in all other respects, but is essentially stale on day one as far as the sweetener goes.
But by far the best is a properly calibrated soda machine with fresh syrup— but it’s only really fresh if it is sucrose. Otherwise it’s basically stale before you even make it.
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(You mean that it takes months in the bottle; it's pretty much instant in the gut.)
Chemistry doesn't support your hypothesis. Sucrose rapidly decomposes into glucose and fructose via acid-catalysis. Coke is very acidic.
The half-life of sucrose in coke under good storage conditions is ~2 weeks[0]. Modestly higher temperatures, such as during transport, reduces that to hours. The internet suggests that that coke is typically consumed 4-12 weeks after manufacturing, depending on the supply chain. Even in the most optimistic scenario, no more than 25% of the sucrose remains when you drink it. Realistically, it will round to 0%. Almost no one has drank a coke that still had sucrose in it.
The process is slower than enzymatic catalysis in the body (seconds to minutes) but still quite fast.
[0] I used an LLM to run the math but the result passes a cursory eyeball test.