'Stamp out Hunger' food drive is Saturday; what to do if you want to help

By the time you finish this sentence, a person somewhere in the world will have died because they could not get enough food to eat.

Five minutes from now, 86 people will be dead. In an hour, it will be more than a thousand.  Of the thousand, 750 are children.

On Saturday, letter carriers around the United States will be collecting food to be delivered to area food banks in the annual "Stamp Out Hunger"  food drive. For 24 years, The National Association of Letter Carriers have collected non-perishable donations left for them at mailboxes around the country. In 2010, the program had collected more than 1 billion pounds of food.

Here are a few statistics about hunger in American and beyond.

What do you know about hunger?

• Every 3.5 seconds a person dies of hunger. Seventy-five percent of them are children.

• Hunger kills more people every year than AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis combined.

• 925 million people do not have enough to eat - more than the combined populations of the United States, Canada and the European Union.

• Ninety-eight percent of people suffering from hunger live in developing countries.

• Women make up a little over half of the world's population, but they account for more than 60 percent of the world's hungry.

• Asia is the continent with the most hungry people.

What happens to your body when starve?

The human body is an amazing machine that adapts and overcomes in an effort to stay alive. However, the battle is a losing one if you don't have enough food.

If you go without food long enough, the starvation process begins and the brain directs the body to use its store of protein – mainly from what muscle mass you have. Eventually, protein is taken from every part of the body and so much is lost that the immune system is compromised.

The heart will shrink, and toxins will build up in the body as the liver and kidneys fail. If the person does not die from disease due to a compromised immune system, death generally comes from cardiac arrest.

How long you can live without food depends on several factors, but if you go totally without food, drinking nothing but water, you are likely to last no more than about three weeks.

That’s them, not us – not really

While starvation happens most frequently in under-developed countries, "First World" counties are far from immune to the problem. Here are a few stats about hunger in the United States from Feeding America.

• 1 in 6 people -- or 49 million Americans -- struggle to put food on the table.

• More than 20 million children receive free or reduced-price lunch each school day. Fewer than half of them get breakfast. Ten percent have access to summer meal sites.

• For every 100 school lunch programs, there are 87 breakfast sites and 36 summer food programs.

• 1 in 7 people are enrolled in Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). Nearly half of them are children.

• 40 percent of food is thrown out in the United States every year, or about $165 billion worth. All of this uneaten food could feed 25 million Americans.

• Eight states have statistically higher food insecurity rates than the U.S. national average of 14.6 percent: Arkansas (21.2%), Mississippi (21.1%), Texas (18%), Tennessee (17.4%), North Carolina (17.3%), Missouri (16.9%), Georgia (16.6%), Ohio (16%).

• In 2013, 5.4 million seniors (over age 60), or 9 percent of all seniors were food insecure.

• Food insecurity exists in every county in the U.S., ranging from a low of 4 percent in Slope County, N.D., to a high of 33 percent in Humphreys County, Miss.

If you want to take part in Stamp Out Hunger:

• Set non-perishable food out at your mailbox in a bag before your letter carrier's normal pick-up time. "Non-perishable food items include: cereal, pasta, pasta sauce or spaghetti sauce, rice, canned fruits and vegetables, canned meals (such as soups, chili and pasta), 100 percent juice, peanut butter, macaroni & cheese, canned protein (tuna, chicken and turkey), beans (canned or dry).

• Does every letter carrier take part in the food drive? According to the "Stamp out Hunger" website, "As much as we would like every letter carrier to take part — and a sizable majority of them do — some letter carriers as well as some post offices opt not to take part in the national Food Drive, for a variety of reasons."

Sources: Feeding America; U.N. World Food Programme; World Hunger; Stamp Out Hunger

Cox Media Group