Dilbert, drop that pastry!

Employees in the New York City offices of Porter Novelli, a public relations firm with branches across the country, now have an alternative snack to what’s offered at the fast-food chains that ring their building near New York’s Grand Central Station. Each week, kitchens in the company’s three floors of office space are filled with baskets of oranges, apples and a rotating “guest fruit.” Recent offerings included kiwis and bananas, along with information from the office manager (who thought up the fruit bonus) about the special item’s nutrients as well as eating tips, such as using a spoon to scoop out the kiwi.

Yes, it’s a nice touch, but employee benefit experts say putting lower-calorie, lower-fat healthful food smack in the line of vision of workers is actually a slowly growing but significant trend in corporate America. And, being nice doesn’t have all that much to do with it.

“Corporations are already paying a lot of money [in healthcare costs] for unhealthy employees and there’s a direct reason for them trying to make the workplace at least nontoxic,” says Helen Darling, head of the National Business Group on Health in Washington, D.C., which represents 245 large employers on healthcare-benefit issues.

Darling, whose group no longer offers anything but beverages for snacks at the many meetings and conferences it sponsors each year, says she’d be “surprised if there’s anyone a couple of years from now who isn’t trying to make [the workplace] a healthier environment.” She likens the current eating initiatives to no-smoking efforts in workplaces 20 years ago.

Public policy experts say Darling’s analogy is exactly right.

In part because of state legislation, particularly in California, beginning in the 1980s, many employers began pushing smoking out of most work sites -- making smoking an unpopular choice, says Thomas Lynne, head of cancer science and trends at the American Cancer Society.

Changes in workplace smoking policy during the last 20 years probably had a dramatic effect on overall smoking behavior, says Jeffrey Levi, executive director of Trust for America’s Health, a nonprofit group based in Washington, D.C., that focuses on preventive health issues. “Banning smoking stigmatized smoking, and it became socially less acceptable to be a smoker,” he says.

Similarly, showcasing healthful foods could stigmatize unhealthful food choices as well.

“If you’re not provided a way to smoke, you’re going to smoke less; and if it’s more difficult to eat high-fat, high-calorie foods, you’re very likely to eat less of them,” Levi says.

Many companies, of course, have long added a perk here and there aimed at getting workers to change exercise and eating habits, such as on-site gyms and gym discounts. Some have even brought in nutritionists to repeat the drill that cutting calories, sugar and fat can help drop the pounds. But now companies are actually serving up food that they hope will help stem a rise in obesity -- and the healthcare costs that come with it.

Until recently, such innovations have been largely the result of a particular boss asking staff in charge of food services to add more-healthful options.

Michael Moore, president of Raleigh Studios, says he worked with the company’s catering staff in response to requests from employees and other food trends he noticed at industry events. The result: Expanded breakfast menus in the commissary and on sound stages that include oatmeal, cereal bars, yogurt and fresh fruit and, sometimes, frozen yogurt and sorbet instead of ice cream.

And Joe Phelps, chief executive of the Phelps Group, says his company’s new snack offerings are driven by “enlightened self-interest.”

The Santa Monica marketing agency provides the snacks for twice weekly late-afternoon progress meetings, serving low-fat, low-calorie options such as cut fruit and baked chips. “At around 3 to 3:30, most people will start looking for something to eat,” Phelps said. “Our thinking is that if we provide them with healthy snacks, they’ll be healthier, they’ll feel better, and they’ll not waste time [out of the office] looking for food.”

Elsewhere, other employers have offered their own innovations. An experiment last year at the Minneapolis headquarters of General Mills Inc. highlighted healthful options in vending machines. Now, those machines stock a greater percentage of healthful snacks, and at least one machine in the employees’ center offers only options such as pretzels, nuts and baked chips. And, at the new corporate headquarters of the Mortgage Lenders Assn. in Wallingford, Conn., the multi-acre campus will include fields of fruits and vegetables that will be served in the company cafeteria.

Now even food contractors are initiating healthier food suggestions for corporate cafeterias.

Aramark, Sodhexo and Marriott, all giant managers of corporate cafeterias, are offering ways to point employees toward healthier choices -- such as a frequent eater card that leads to a free entree after the purchase of several healthier-choice entrees (think sea bass with mango sauce versus a cheeseburger) or a discount of a few dollars on lower-fat, lower-calorie entrees.

“Since the introduction of the discount, we have seen a large increase in the number of turkey burgers sold per month,” says Angela Hult, spokeswoman for the Regence Group, a group of health plans in the Pacific Northwest.

And just in the last few months, the National Business Group on Health issued a Healthy Dining Toolkit to help employers figure out the nutritional content of the food they’re serving, guidelines for negotiating food options with vendors, consumer brochures on eating in the workplace and a training guide for food service workers.

A few state health departments as well as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also have produced brochures about healthful food options at meetings.

For example, using recommendations from a brochure produced by the Seattle health department, an environmental group meeting in Seattle recently added sliced tangerines and apples to its break menu -- and got rave reviews from attendees, says Michelle Oberg, a nutritionist who helped develop the guidelines.

Jennifer Seymour, an epidemiologist with the CDC’s division of nutrition and physical activity, says the CDC decided to involve itself in menus because “many employees consume a significant portion of [their] food away from home.”

According to the NPD Group in Port Washington, N.Y., a consumer marketing research firm, 40% of American employees eat at least one meal away from home every day.

The National Institutes of Health is currently funding at least 16 studies on obesity and the work site. The research aims to assess the effect on employee health of, among other things, increasing healthful food options in vending machines, cafeterias and catering; point of purchase information about nutrients and calories; changes in portion sizes; and price subsidies for healthful food options.

“These types of studies are important because they change the eating ... environment, making the healthy choices the easy choices,” says Carol Devine, an associate professor of nutritional sciences at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y.

Corporations aren’t limiting their healthful food efforts to their own premises. Conference experts such as Kimberly Miles, vice president of conventions and meetings at the American Hotel and Lodging Assn. in Washington, D.C., says meeting planners are more often asking hotels, convention centers and catering chains to add fresh produce to menus as well as low-fat dressings, whole grain breads and juices and trail mix and fruit at breaks. Smoothie bars, in fact, are a recent addition for meeting breaks at the Fairmont Hotel in Phoenix.

It’s too early to tell whether such efforts will make a difference to employee health or the employer’s financial bottom line.

“Healthy eating programs send positive, caring messages, to the workforce, [but] they represent just one of many employer efforts to improve employee health,” says Kirby Bosley, head of the healthcare consulting practice, in the Western U.S., for Watson Wyatt, a benefits consulting firm.

As a result, she says, it’s virtually impossible to measure the financial return on investment of just this effort.

But nutritionists see it as a great first step; albeit one of many needed to reduce obesity.

“People may need their workplace to help make food choices for them because they may be comfortable with their current, [possibly poor] eating habits, or they may not be familiar with healthy snack options,” says Ruth Frechman, a Los Angeles-based nutritionist and spokeswoman for the American Dietetic Assn.

She suspects that many employees may find it difficult to adjust to food changes presented by employers and may even resist them.

But she adds: “If they start -- say, eating a fruit instead of chips for snacks at work they may well try the same thing at home.”