I'm not personally afraid of GMOs, but I do not fault people for being skeptical of them. Completely synthetic foods and food processing have a mediocre track

I'm not personally afraid of GMOs, but I do not fault people for being skeptical of them. Completely synthetic foods and food processing have a mediocre track record, and in many cases have caused actual harm (e.g. trans fats) for a long time before that harm was uncovered. Even in cases where there is no active harm, heavily processed foods very often have lower nutritional content than their less processed "whole" cousins. Take wheat for instance. We bleach it, denuding it of its nutritional value, and then try to add back the missing nutrients. Why? Obviously that's apples and oranges -- GMO foods don't do the same thing that food processing, oil hydrogenation, etc. do... they're totally different technologies. But for the average person who doesn't deeply understand these issues, it's easy to look at the poor track record of "better living through chemistry" and be skeptical. The general perception is that anything that "messes with" food is either reducing its nutritional content or adding something harmful. Another reason for skepticism about GMOs stems from the poor track record of medical studies on the relative benefit or harm of various nutrients and foods. Take saturated fats for example, which were demonized for decades. Instead people were encouraged to eat trans fats like margarine, which turned out to be worse for you. Now apparently saturated fats are not too bad in moderation, or something. I don't know. That will probably be reversed next month, then reversed again, then reversed again, and each time the media will trumpet the news. Each big new finding about nutrition seems to contradict previous findings, leading to a general view among many people that nutritional science has no idea what it's talking about. We can't even figure out after decades of study whether or not fat is bad for you and you're telling me we're absolutely 100% sure GMOs are safe...? Get the picture? Finally, I think there's a problem of institutional trust. I've asked some organic hippie type friends before if they'd be more open to GMOs if they were made by non-profits working toward the public interest, if they were open source, and if all results of all studies were completely public. I've mostly gotten nods to that. People don't trust closed for-profit companies not to hide negative results, engage in research study "payola," push things to market that have known problems, etc. The trust issue is huge. Any time this comes up around here I tend to post and bring it up, and for the most part nobody gets it. People are afraid of GMO foods and parents are not vaccinating their children because the Bush administration lied about Iraq (to give one example). For some reason that is just flatly obvious to me. Why does nobody else see this?