Golf Just Became A Little Bit Healthier

It's always fun to find a golf-related medical study in the wild. Golf is, after all, great for your health; you're outdoors for hours at a time, walking for miles while carrying a big heavy bag on your back. At least, that's how you should be playing it. Cart golf is for squares.

There is, however, a bit of a dark side when it comes to golf and health, and that's pesticide exposure. Golf may be intimately tied to nature and the great outdoors, but nobody can honestly call a golf course a particularly natural thing. They're 150-acre lawns, after all. And maintaining a lawn – and by extension a golf course – requires chemicals, chemicals that could potentially be harmful to humans.

Now, the most common pesticides aren't particularly dangerous to humans – golf courses aren't spraying their fairways with mustard gas – but we're still talking about a chemical that's specifically designed to be lethal, so to test just how much pesticide exposure golfers undergo during a typical round, a group of researchers from Massachusetts decided to conduct an ... interesting experiment.

You do have to give it to the researchers, they must have been very persuasive in order to convince eight golfers to play a round of golf on a simulated golf course literally drenched in pesticides moments before the round. Then again, golfers will play in some pretty wild conditions. 

Anyway, with their volunteers recruited and properly suited up to capture pesticide levels, the golfers were sent out for 4 hours to play their round. Afterward, the golfers who were in full-body protective suits had their suits analyzed, while those were not fully protected had their urine analyzed. And happily, pesticide exposure was low, despite the golfers playing in what the researchers described as a "worst-case" scenario, pesticide wise. There was some residue on the hands and lower legs, but airborne exposure was very minimal.

The researchers compared their results to a similar study conducted in 2008, finding that pesticide exposure has fallen dramatically in the 16-year interim. Modern pesticides, being less toxic and less volatile, have significantly reduced the adverse effects golfers experience from exposure. Obviously, you probably still want to wash your hands after a round, but nowadays, the biggest risk to your health you'll find on the golf course is the coronary you'll give yourself after your sixth three-putt of the day.