Man suffers heart attack at Heart Attack Grill in Las Vegas: Report
(CBS) When the Heart Attack Grill opened its doors, the restaurant playfully said its oversized burgers were a "taste worth dying for." Now that a man has suffered a heart attack while eating a "triple bypass burger" at the Las Vegas branch of the restaurant, Fox 5 News reported, nobody is laughing.
"The gentleman could barely talk," the restaurant's owner "Dr. Jon" Basso told Fox News. "He was sweating, suffering. Anyone with an ounce of compassion would've felt for him." There's amateur video of the man in his 40s being taken from the restaurant.
The Grill is known for its fatty fare, and contains menu items like flatliner fries and double-bybass burger, HealthPop reported in May when the restaurant opened up a Dallas chain.
At the time, the restaurant offered free eating to people who weigh more than 350 pounds and justified that with a tongue-in-cheek mission statement: "Doctors agree that continually cycling body weight up and down is one of the very worst things a person can do to themselves. That's why our program is focused upon keeping your weight in an extremely stable, gradual, and constant upward slope."
Even the restaurant's owner, who jokingly calls himself "Dr. Jon" even though he has no medical training, recognizes the danger of overindulging in fatty fare on a regular basis and said at the time, "don't come here every day. If you do, you're going to die."
What does the owner think now?
"I actually felt horrible for the gentleman because the tourists were taking photos of him as if it were some type of stunt," Basso told Fox News. "Even with our own morbid sense of humor, we would never pull a stunt like that."
According to the report, diners were back eating at the Las Vegas restaurant when it reopened Tuesday.
Needless to say, a diet like this can over time raise the risk for obesity. Obesity carries all sorts of health risks, including heart disease, type 2 diabetes, cancer, high blood pressure, stroke, liver disease, sleep problems, and osteoarthritis.
CBS Sunday Morning profiled the restaurant's original store opening in Chandler Arizona in 2008. That chain closed down in June of 2011, two months after the death of its 29-year-old 575-pound spokesman, CBS News reported.
