A socially agitative work that throws a light on a systematic American political failure, and the placement of private profit and special interests ahead of public health, Fed Up tackles the childhood obesity plague in a manner that roils the stomach and heart in equal measure. Narrated by Katie Couric, director Stephanie Soechtig’s documentary lays waste to the cruel, dismissive assessment that corpulence is simply a reflection of a lack of personal willpower, arguing that lethargy, eating to excess and other behaviors associated with being overweight are often the result of overwhelmed biochemistry, and not the root cause of obesity.

One leaping-off reference point for Fed Up is the revelatory nonfiction offering Food, Inc., which did a solid $4.4 million in theaters in 2009, while also spawning a companion book of the same name. But the more apt comparisons may be the Oscar-winning An Inconvenient Truth and 2004’s Super Size Me — films that got in the mainstream zeitgeist and seemed to alter perceptions on a fundamental level. Fed Up feels like it has the same potential, in that it elicits concern and personal reflection in similar portions. Soechtig’s film has the macro, analytical surveyor’s eye of the former film. It also has a pinch of the anecdotal pop (if not outrageousness) of the latter; its truths are self-evident and easy to grasp for a layperson, in other words.

Its makers are smart enough, too, to know what criticisms are coming their way. Fed Up sizes up the pushback-playbook of anti-regulation free-marketers (with its attendant howls of “nanny state” overreach), and shrewdly assays the lack of scientific mooring in their arguments. The association the film ultimately draws, comparing food industry causality deniers to Big Tobacco CEOs paraded before Congress, lying through their teeth, isn’t necessarily kind. But neither does it seem inappropriate. For the full, original review, from Paste, click here. (TWC/Radius, unrated, 98 minutes)