Before you flip the page because you don’t have diabetes or you have your blood sugar under control, please stay with me. I have a special story to share with you about astonishing new developments in preventing or controlling diabetes.

Strangely enough, camels are involved.

I’ll spare you the details about the complicated biochemistry involved with diabetes. Even researchers are still discovering the intricacies of how various molecular hormonal reactions influence blood sugar levels.

My reading on the subject has taken me to the Journal of Dairy Science and even to reports about research developed by the Department of Biology in the College of Food Science at United Arab Emirates University (UAEU) with support from Zayed Center of Health Sciences at UAEU.

UAEU’s research led to the recommendation to drink camel’s milk daily to help control blood sugar. The exact mechanism behind the benefits of camel milk for diabetes is yet to be fully understood, but there is no doubt from controlled studies that camel milk helps stabilize blood sugar levels in diabetic patients and reduces the probability of patients transitioning from type II diabetes to type I. In type 2 diabetes your body can’t effectively use the hormone insulin to help your body’s cells use glucose, or sugar, for energy. This causes sugar to stay in your blood at unhealthy levels. With type 1 diabetes your body doesn’t produce insulin.

And while I was researching this column, I happened upon a few other interesting facts about camels, the ships of the desert. They have double rows of long eyelashes – not to make them attractive like a movie star wearing false eyelashes – but to shield their eyes from blowing sand.

Camels have a third eyelid, which is their “windshield wiper” to keep sand and dirt out of their eyes during sandstorms. Humans have a remnant of a third eyelid. If you look in a mirror it appears as a tiny little structure at the corner of your eye by your nose. Camels also have nostrils they can close to keep out sand.

Camels’ broad, flat padded feet are leathery pads with two toes on each foot to prevent them from sinking into sand or snow. They would be a good mode of transportation when you are at the beach.

Now, back to camel’s milk. To take advantage of the diabetes-fighting properties of camel milk – and to help the many Americans who have diabetes – I propose developing camel herds in the U.S. That’s because dairy cows don’t produce milk with the molecular properties that help control diabetes as does camel milk.

To help develop a camel dairy industry, maybe Select Sires of Plain City could diversify their artificial insemination collection service for cattle to a similar service for breeding superior milk-producing camels.

Select Sires could establish a branch in the desert of White Sands or Death Valley where camels could breed naturally. And a board-certified animal reproduction specialist (Theriogenologist) like myself, or a PhD reproduction specialist, could help establish semen quality parameters required to produce high-fertility bull camels for passing on high production milk genetics. I wonder if camel semen would be frozen at -273oF. like male bovine sperm. Hm-m-m……

And this could lead to other camel opportunities. A veterinary colleague of mine teaches at Washington State University. He once was the farm veterinarian for the King of Morocco’s racing camel stable. As my proposed camel milk industry develops, camel racing and pari-mutuel betting might be able to fund a major portion of the continuing research into why drinking camel milk has such a positive effect on people with diabetes.

I wonder if one humped camels (dromedaries) or two humped camels (Bactrian) are higher milk producers.

The really hot news flash is that a three-humped camel colony was discovered in the Rub al-Khali desert in Oman. This new species has been rumored to have resulted from global warming, but in a literature search I could find nothing to back this up. But why not? Global warming has allegedly caused everything else.