Heart Attack Grill promoter dies young

Blair River, the 575-pound promoter of Heart Attack Grill restaurants, is dead at 29. [Daily Mail]

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bcsizemo

Simply adding “more” to something does not make it better….

The only way this would be more ironic is if he passed from a heart attack…

I’m guessing by the outfits they are wearing it’s like Hooters, but with food that’s even more worse for you…
OldRipbeak

Hooters indeed, though the owner “contends that his ingredients are all natural â€” not processed â€” and that if customers split a ‘single-bypass burger’ that is ‘probably the healthiest meal theyâ€™re going to have all week.”

In the article, there’s a picture with what looks like a customer in a hospital gown and ID wristband, apparently watching a lingerie show. Oh, and having a burger.
Drabula

cows everywhere rejoice
- akamarkman
  
  Quote: “Mooooo”
andhisband

A beloved man has died, and all of you mock him for his size, which was also the tone of the original article. Shame on all of you.
- IronEdithKidd
  
  BB has covered the Heart Attack Grill in the past. This is no more than a follow-up.
  
  Be advised that one should stay as far away from the Daily Mail as possible. The content is specious in the best of times, and reader comments there are some of the most poisonous on the web.
  
  I am sorry for your communityâ€™s loss. And for his familyâ€™s loss. There is no greater tragedy than outliving your children.
- talzaken
  
  I hear you man. Death is a tragedy in any package. I don’t however hear the mocking tone in the article. They state that he’s died and what made him famous. That there is more than a casual relationship between his infamy and his death is by no means enough to classify them as mocking. Compare this obit to the one for Frank Buckles, the last WW1 vet to have died:
  
  http://m.boingboing.net/2011/02/28/frank-buckles-last-l.html
  
  You’ll note that it includes the exact same information.
Anonymous

He encouraged a dangerous lifestyle, and one that ultimately killed him. Nobody’s saying he wasn’t fun at parties but he’s done a good job of convincing people to kill themselves.

If he’d counseled that they use a gun, or bleach, he’d have been arrested, but to counsel death by hamburger somehow makes him immune to criticism.
JonStewartMill

Bleh. Please give a warning when you link to the Daily Fail. That horrible excuse for a newspaper combines the worst traits of USA Today and Weekly World News.
- hbl
  
  I agree – I think we need to suffocate the Daily Mail’s profile, which must do a successful line in aggro-spam to get their traffic up. Ideally I would like to self censor it from my own web browsing by having any Mail link hiding behind URL shorteners to redirect to an online service whereby I can request a complete stranger to come to my house and punch me in my face.
  - JonStewartMill
    
    I use a Firefox addon called Kitten Block to prevent such stealth assaults on my intelligence and sense of decency, but it was disabled during my move to FF4b12. All is well now.
VICTOR JIMENEZ

I was expecting more and end like the classic:

“Would monsieur like a wafer thin mint?”
andhisband

Yes, there is an invitation by the press to mock the man: this is not news outside of perhaps his local community, where apparently people do feel his death is a tragedy.

There is no shown causal link between his death and his weight: he died of complications of influenza, possibly pneumonia. My own father died of pneumonia as a complication of another condition, and he was lucky if he ever got up to 140 lbs.

And if you need evidence that the story was not intended to invite mockery, just read the posts that it brought.
- Anonymous
  
  BS. I don’t see an invitation by the press to mock the man; the restaurant and by extension the spokesperson has been shown on national TV so it is news outside of his local community. The writer of the article can’t help it if people post ignorant or idiotic comments unless the site moderates the comments. If you read comments on a regular basis on any news/blog article, you’ll see that there’s always some commenters posting inappropriate things. You’re the one highlighting the “mocking” comments whereas most people would just ignore the trolls.
- talzaken
  
  You know, I think you may be right. While I still don’t see anything specifically mocking in the tone of this post, you’re right to question the news-worthiness of this story.
  
  It’s my bad for not having actually read the article in question. (Which is why I didn’t know the actual causes for his death. Still, I hold that being 575 pounds can complicate even the simplest of medical scenarios, whether or not it’s arbiter of their outcomes.) It’s BB’s bad too, though, for leaving so much room for incorrect inference, as one must admit that I’m not insane to have assumed from the article that his weight was the cause of death.
  
  I’m sorry to hear of your loss, and ashamed of the sting in this comment board’s tone.
- chgoliz
  
  Prior medical condition is absolutely a determining factor in which person recovers from the flu in a day or two and which one gets progressively sicker and sicker until he (or she) dies.
  
  Not only too much weight: those with from eating disorders also get sicker and even die from not-directly-related medical causes at a higher rate than those in a normal range of body weight.
missamo80

So sad :( My wife and I ate there on the way through Arizona on a two week road trip last fall. French fries fried in lard? Yuuuumy.

Neil
Antinous / Moderator

Jeez, what a bunch of concern trolls. The guy was double morbidly obese, championed a lifestyle based on fat and dropped dead in his twenties. It’s what’s known as a cautionary tale. Other people might learn from this idiot’s Darwinian plunge into an early grave.
Brainspore

The average 29-year-old male is somewhere around 175 pounds. So measured by pound-years, a 575-pound guy living to the age of 29 is like a regular guy living to the age of 95! Not a bad run.
travtastic

Hell, healthy people die at 29 all the time! I’m sure someone would be willing to provide some anecdotal evidence to that end. It had nothing to do with the fact that he was the size of 3 people and spoke for a place based around the idea of eating so much that you die.