In Part 1, I looked at the nutritional evidence - the declining omega-3 content, the shifting fat ratios, the emerging microplastics research. In Part 2, I want to talk about what's been happening in the water I grew up on. In early 2025, a bacterial outbreak tore through salmon farms in the D'Entrecasteaux Channel. Over 10 million kilograms of Atlantic salmon died. Congealed fatty material washed onto beaches. Antibiotics entered the waterway. Rock lobster and abalone - including from fisheries my father worked for decades - had to be closed after testing positive for florfenicol. This is EPA-documented. It happened in the channel I love. And it's part of a global pattern, not a Tasmanian anomaly. This post covers what the research tells us, what the Planetary Health Diet has to say, and most usefully - what to actually eat instead.

I'm a fisherman's daughter. I grew up on the boat with my father, a professional cray fisherman, eating fish as fresh as it gets. I have a shack now in the D'Entrecasteaux Channel in southern Tasmania, opposite the salmon farms. Over the years I've watched that waterway change in ways that are hard to come to terms with. That tension - between what I grew up proud of and what I see happening to those waters - is part of why I'm writing this. So is the clinical picture. The evidence on farmed Atlantic salmon has shifted considerably, and most people, including the mainland naturopaths I spoke to at a recent conference, have no idea. This is Part 1: what's actually changed in the nutritional profile of farmed salmon, and why the health case for it is weaker than it used to be.

Every autumn, basket in hand, I find myself moving slowly along the hedgerows of Tasmania harvesting hawthorn berries - and every year I'm reminded that somewhere along the way, herbalists put this plant in a box. Hawthorn became "the cardiovascular herb," and in doing so, we sidelined the berry: the part most widely used traditionally, and the part modern research is now revealing as a powerful, gut-mediated medicine. From TCM's Shan Zha to the latest microbiome science, it's time to bring the berry back to the table.