The same thing applies to the mere ongoing, never-ending act of staying healthy and fit versus becoming yet another person who´s fully embracing the sedentary and out-of-shape way of life.

Across all these examples I just mentioned and many more the “social click” metric is a sad flaw in the human psyche, I am saying sad because it sadly far more often promotes the less healthy behavior as the socially acceptable and right thing to do.

This is extremely illogical, and unfortunate because it is a major driver behind obesity, alcohol consumption, smoking, vaping, drug abuse, poor health, lower-quality old age, and just plain sedentary, and unhealthy lifestyles.

No, it is true, no one has to exercise or consume healthy foods.

But eating too much, eating foods that are too rich in energy and lacking in satiety, protein, and nutrients harms human health.

So the sad aspect of it has nothing to do with superfluous metrics such as body fat and body composition. It´s sad because most of those poor health outcomes could easily have been mitigated through better, ongoing habits, so when the opposite keeps happening it is a quality of life thief that really should not exist.

So in the end, peer pressure and a longing to belong to a pack of your peers is a primal key pillar in maintaining this unfortunate ecosystem of poor human health and poor lifestyle habits across junk food, a lack of exercise, to little sleep, no work/life balance, drug abuse, smoking and alcohol.
Coach Mike, Strength By Fitness

People foster each other’s poor habits instead of encouraging a lasting change to a healthier way of life.

So, instead of rooting for each other to make healthier habits and slowly craft a higher quality lifestyle that will allow us all to age gracefully with far better outcomes in health, physical, and cognitive capacity people succumb to that primal pack mentality. Fostering each other’s poor habits instead of encouraging a lasting change to a healthier way of life.

In the end, making it far easier for people on average to reduce other people’s healthier habits compared to being the one that changes your own unhealthy habits. So much so that I consider it to be one of the main reasons why so many fail at some point to maintain a healthier lifestyle for the rest of their life.

It´s for many much easier to give up and join the far bigger pack of people with substantially worse health and aging outcomes. Clearly, not better, but much easier, for a lot of people, since we ancient homo sapiens are for all our accolades and modern-day achievements nothing but primal pack animals on the inside.

Or as this quote from the cited study summarized it.
Plant-based food habits are seen as environmentally friendly, health-conscious people who adhere to high moral standards, and are worthy of admiration. But on the contrary, they also elicit fear, contempt, and anger in the meat-eating participants in the study, who as a result socially exclude and even show aggression toward them.