Vitamins: Powered By Google?

Image via Design Fabulous

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Image via Design Fabulous

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Image via Design Fabulous

​ Apparently vitamins are good for you, but as to specifics we're pretty perplexed. That's why we were psyched to see the following student project on Yanko, our favorite concept blog.

If FarmVille creator Zynga could get randomly into the bad-for-you dessert market with FarmVille Ice Cream, then why shouldn't Bay Area information gateway Google get into the relatively more wholesome vitamin business, as a reseller of course? Designer Andrew Kim agreed with us and came up with the mock-ups, above, of what a Google-branded foray into vitamins might look like. Take the fact that three-quarters of U.S. adults deficient in vitamin D, add the ongoing proliferation of hard-to-understand vitamin bottles and prescriptions, and Google could bring some of its branded search simplicity to the complicated process of helping us decide which vitamins to take and when. After all, they've already got a whole platform devoted to our health.

By administering an online quiz (and hopefully NOT by scraping all the health data they've gleaned from Gmail), Google could pinpoint our specific nutrition needs and serve up a vitamin cocktail tailored to fit. Kim has even come up with a smartphone integration feature, including a helpful reminder to "Take your vitamins!" As if Google didn't have enough on us already.

And in case you're worried that Google Vitamin might turn the search company into a "pusher" of more than just cats, porn, and text ads, the FDA classifies vitamins as food not drugs, i.e. non-addictive. Wish we could say the same for FarmVille.