Seeking the “super food” from camel milk

Camel milk is known to have diverse health-promoting properties, with research over the past two decades showing that camel milk can help lower blood sugar levels, improve insulin sensitivity in both type 1 and type 2 diabetics, and possibly reduce the occurrence of diseases such as diabetes, hypertension, cancer and stomach flu.

With a surge in global demand for camel milk, specifically from Chinese and European markets, camel herding countries are working to increase camel milk production. But supplies remain limited, making camel milk both expensive and not readily available to global markets. To address this, a team of researchers at United Arab Emirates University has been working to produce a bioactive protein hydrolysate and isolate specific bioactive peptides from camel milk’s beneficial proteins to be used as health-promoting nutritional supplements.

Camel milk proteins and peptides possess antioxidant properties, is good for the gut microbiome, is nutrient rich and has been shown to lower cholesterol levels, research shows. It’s tolerated by most people who are lactose intolerant because it contains less lactose than cow’s milk.

“It’s still not clear what exactly is in camel milk which plays such an important role,” says Sajid Maqsood, lead author on a research paper published in Food Chemistry last summer. Along with collaborator Mohammed Ayoub from UAEU’s Biology Department, College of Science, the research team is working to determine the specific peptides in camel milk proteins contributing to health benefits and exploring how best to produce camel milk-derived bioactive peptides.

“Our research focuses primarily on promoting camel milk as a super food. It can be really beneficial if consumed regularly,” he says. In a study of camel milk protein hydrolysates published in the Journal of Dairy Science in February 2021, Maqsood and his colleagues determined that a camel milk-derived protein hydrolysate was shown to prevent diabetes complications in mice.

The UAEU team has been able to generate peptides under optimized conditions and explore their specific health benefits, but Maqsood says more research is needed to test synthesized peptides in pure form using different cell line and animal models to determine which specific components or sequence are producing health benefits.

“We have identified peptides in the camel milk; we believe those peptides might be the ones responsible for the anti-diabetic benefits,” says Maqsood. He and Ayoub have synthesized the potential anti-diabetic peptides from camel whey and casein proteins in the lab and are currently testing those peptides on specific markers related to diabetes and how they can activate the insulin receptor.