Super Size Me doesn’t give viewers much in the way of revolutionary messages. We know, at least subconsciously, that fast food dissolves our insides into pudding. The film’s value, like that of Fahrenheit 9/11, lies in the aggregate of images and its style of delivery.

Director Morgan Spurlock uses a personal experiment - a month of McDonald’s for every meal - to show the dangerous and ridiculous effects of fast food on an average American.

His cavalier honesty gives the film a kind of empathy: Most of us have ridden the fat and sugar highs he talks at length about. I’d bet that many of us have also experienced the sickness, nausea, weight gain and worrisome blood work that he did.

Few of us do anything about it. The CDC says that two-thirds of Americans fit snugly in the overweight or obese categories.

The measure they use is weight in kilograms divided by height in meters squared - the body mass index. My BMI, for example, is just over 20, or on the low end of the average range. A BMI of 25 to 29 qualifies for overweight, and one of 30 or more qualifies for obese.

Fast food isn’t the only culprit. Many of the best-selling supermarket items are packaged foods with high sugar, high sodium, high fat or all three. Foods that taste good but lack the best nutrition make up the majority of choices available to us.

The choice of foods, as an issue, outstrips class and economy in America. I volunteered for more than two years (2000-2003) at a food pantry, and a number of the “consumers” were overweight or obese. (They insisted we use the empowering term “consumer” for our patrons, a policy I never felt comfortable with.) Much of the food we had to give away came from the USDA, which Spurlock highlights in a school cafeteria scene. We filled out the grocery bags with high-sodium packaged foods, sugared cereals and desserts, and sent them on their caloried way.

Our attention seems directed away from health to focus on issues like who’s marrying whom, and who’s last on the island with the barrel of cash. Neither of those issues will kill us if we ignore it.

We have a nation of abundance. Changes to that basic fact of nature, with luck, lay far in the future. With that in mind, as a nation we need to focus on nurturing a little discipline when it comes to food.