570-Pound Arizona Model Hired to Promote Heart Attack Grill

Nov. 16, 2010— -- Blair River's a big boy. There's just no getting around it.

So he's putting his girth to use as the newly appointed spokesmodel for an Arizona restaurant that proudly proclaims "a taste worth dying for" as its motto.

River, who's 6 feet 8 inches tall and weighs 570 pounds, has appeared in online video advertisements for $100 an hour promoting the decidedly unhealthy fare at the Heart Attack Grill in Chandler, where customers who weigh more than 350 pounds eat for free and the fries are deep-fried in lard.

River, 29, said he was merely a fan of the restaurant when he saw its owner, Jon Basso, advertising for a spokesman -- a big spokesman.

"He was looking for people over 500 pounds to do a commercial," River said. "I said hey, 'I'll do it.'"

Basso, known to restaurant patrons as Dr. Jon, in keeping with the restaurant's hospital theme, is no stranger to using gimmicks and entertainment to promote his restaurant. The menu proudly boasts both a "Quadruple Bypass Burger" and its "Flatliner Fries."

For his "Butterfat Shake," Grasso said, "the fat content of the cream is so high that if we have a quarter percent more, it would churn to butter in the ice cream machine."

Is he doing it to get the goat of nutritionists who blanch at the mere name of his restaurant? Maybe.

"We're in the front lines of the battle against anorexia," joked Basso, who's 45 and "normal weighted."

But River insisted he has no problem being seen as the big guy behind the big food. He said he's healthy, even though doctors lecture him to lose weight "all the time."

"This is me. If it's not me, it's going to be another guy," he said. "It doesn't bother me. I don't feel exploited or anything like that."

But maybe he should.

"This is like restaurant porn," said Keith Ayoob, director of the nutrition clinic at the Rose F. Kennedy Center in the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York. "Somebody who is 350 pounds and over and eating this way is just going to be digging their grave with a spoon."