Yeah It always happens to me too... I often die of starvation/thirst rather than bullets or axes...
Almost every player acknowledges this bug... but for some reason developers and moderator cannot "reproduce" this bug...or need "more information"...
You don't even have to "reproduce" and information is plenty when you look at all those post where they talk about it. That is really something that easily can make this alpha a more better version as it enhances gameplay on such a big scale!

EDIT; I want to add that it's maybe not such a bad idea to reactivate the cool "meters" that we know from the mod. They were solid, reactive, pretty realistic on a matter of time.