Engineers generally like smart people with powerful brains. If exercise improves the function of your brain, that's something that is likely interesting to engineers. Especially if they get into the details of how and why.

Shutting down discussion of "living healthy" is kind of counter intuitive to fostering a community of smart people. You can be smart without exercising, but exercising does seem to help the process. It's crazy to see something that makes you smarter and hear someone say "please stop talking about that, it bores me". Maybe you always hear people talking about it because it really is that useful of a tool?