As I said, I agree with the criticisms of Lustig for the most part. I just think Feinman's response is a case of the blind talking about the blind. The Pop Tarts thing is just illustrative of how Feinman is sloppy about the details throughout his article.

The hepatic portal is not a metabolic pathway. Even if it were, most metabolic pathways are not designed to protect us from what they are metabolizing. Fructose actually is considerably more dangerous to our tissues than glucose or fatty acids, by orders of magnitude, which is why the hepatic portal shunts it directly to the liver without allowing it to circulate through the body even once.