let's gather feathers.

haha. Well, as a biology/premed student, I think I'd agree with your brother - refined or not, it's still just sucrose, which is a disaccharide of glucose and fructose, naturally occurring in sugar cane. The refining process cleans up the arrangement a bit, and usually involved bleaching it to make it prettier, but it doesn't change its essential chemical makeup as pure simple sugars, which are carbohydrates and therefore a building block of nutrition.

But I agree that a more scientific outlook is *definitely* needed in regards to these things.