Jason,
I'm not buying that the guys I observe playing in carts at the courses I frequent are coming anywhere remotely near 1,000kcals above basal metabolism during their round. Don't know where that number comes from (the Compendium maybe?) but I do know what 1,000kcals of light activity looks like. And it ain't what these guys are engaging in walking six steps from the seat in the cart to the golf ball.
I'm talking about two guys or a married couple sharing a cart in which the one in the passenger seat will literally not walk even 20 yards to their ball while the driver is standing by his ball preparing to hit his shot. The passenger waits for the driver to clamber in and drive the cart to again literally within a couple paces of the ball.
Hell I see twosomes in carts where they drive around behind the green to drop off the guy whose ball is on the back of the green, then the guy driving the cart backtracks the 50 feet to the nearest point to his ball in the bunker. A lot of "cart golf" is clearly being pursued in a way that absolutely minimizes the total amount of exertion to a ridiculous manner.
Now if you're talking Cart Paths Only and trekking three or four miles total over the course of a round back and forth to a path located on the far side of a bunch of mounds, well I'm not sure I buy the 1,000kcals but it seems possible. Driving straight to the ball just doesn't generate any significant number of steps and the intensity is vanishingly low even as the duration is only a few seconds at a time.
BCowan,
Of course not many people are walking 30 minutes a day. We live in a nation of sedentary lardasses. And again I have no objection to a sedentary lardass riding in a golf cart to his heart's content. I'm simply pointing out the level of activity that, if pursued regularly over the long term, will have proven health benefits. And the drive-straight-to-the-ball game of golf is much less beneficial than that simple 30-minute walk.
Look, this stuff isn't homeopathic. By some abstract calculus a totally sedentary person would benefit from walking to the mailbox and back each day instead of reaching out their car window to gather the mail while sitting in their car. But in reality, you just can't accumulate enough ten-second low intensity micro doses of physical activity to add up to an Active Lifestyle.
I've seen metabolic cart data from morbidly obese, totally sedentary individuals who literally work up a sweat and breathe hard walking from one end of their house to the other. For those people, even little teensy doses of doing something beside sitting on the couch waiting to die can make a difference. But on a population basis, encouraging retirement-age couples to ride around in a golf cart because supposedly they'll lose weight and build strength and live longer and feel better is pretty half-assed advice. Better than being on the couch? Probably. A thousand calories a round burned and a long-term improvement in cardiovascular fitness? No, that takes a different kind of physical activity than what I see on the golf course every day from cart riders.