Wadada Healthy Market and Juice Bar, Atlanta’s first Black woman-owned health market and juice bar, is celebrating five years of business in the West End. The fifth-anniversary celebration will be held on Saturday, April 6 from 11 a.m.-7 p.m. with a unity ceremony at 2 p.m. The celebration will include all-day giveaways, a new menu launch, tastings and discounts on purchases of $20 or more.
When Jeanette Sellers, also known as Sister Nilajah Ma’at, opened Wadada in 2019, it was born out of a need to address the health crisis in the Black community. Over the past 30 years, Sellers said she had to watch as many of her family members, young and old, died due to heart disease and cancer. The illnesses within her family led her to adopt a plant-based lifestyle and explore the Rastafari movement, a spiritual way of life developed in Jamaica that stresses eating fresh, organic and preferably homegrown produce.
Through that lifestyle change of eating healthier foods, Sellers said the journey gave her the roadmap of combining foods to increase healing.
“Wadada is here to hopefully encourage our community to simplify their diet and make healthier choices,” Sellers said.
“We have to solve our own problems. Profit over people is deeply entrenched in the culture of America, and so people benefit from sickness. That’s really just the bottom line. Unfortunately, Black communities are the most neglected, and I’m just here to kind of solve the problem and be a servant and see what I can do to change our state and our condition because it can be changed and it doesn’t it really doesn’t take a lot.”
According to the Department for Health and Human Services’ Office of Minority Health, African Americans are generally at higher risk for heart diseases, stroke, cancer, asthma, influenza and pneumonia, diabetes…
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