Fructose

Fructose is a white crystalline solid that occurs naturally in honey, fruits and some vegetables. It is a monosaccharide, a single sugar unit, and it is one of the two units that make up sucrose, where it is linked to glucose. Plants such as chicory and Jerusalem artichokes store it as inulin.

It is the sweetest of the common sugars, at roughly 1.7 times the sweetness of sucrose according to the Oxford dictionary entry quoted by Encyclopedia.com. That sweetness is why it is used as a sweetener and preservative in foods, most often as high-fructose corn syrup, which appears in soft drinks, jams, cookies and many other processed foods. The same reference reports that US consumption of the syrup rose from about 2 million metric tons in 1980 to just over 8 million in 2000.