 Hey everybody, Dr. O here and this video we're going to talk about the three types of loose connected tissues. Remember that loose connected tissues has less collagen than dense connect tissue, hence the name loose versus dense. So here we see adipose tissue or fat tissue. A key thing to remember here, so adipocytes or adipocytes are going to be your fat cells, but there are two types of fat. Now when we think of fat, we think of white fat. White fat is stored energy, you can store about 3,500 calories in a pound of fat. That's what white fat is, but brown fat is brown because it's very vascular, has lots of blood vessels and has lots of mitochondria. Brown fat is very metabolically active, but its job is to break down fat and produce heat instead. So children have more brown fat, people that can probably eat too many calories and burn them off easily probably have more brown fat, but so white fat is the fat you think of stored energy, 3,500 calories give or take per pound. Brown fat is a special metabolically active fat, its job is to help with heat production. That's why some people do like cold plunges or they call it a cold thermogenesis. If you get cold, it's believed to activate brown fat to keep your body temperature up and might help you burn some calories. Adipocytes do not divide, so your fat cells will shrink. If you lose weight, your fat cells aren't disappearing, they're shrinking. If you gain weight, your fat cells are going to get larger. If your fat cells get full of fat and there's nowhere else to put fat, then mesenchymal or mesenchymal stem cells will produce more fat cells. It's even believed that like if you have liposuction and your body carves out fat cells, that these stem cells will rebuild them. So fat cells adipocytes do not divide. All right, so that's adipose tissue. Next we have reticular tissue. The word reticula means little net in Latin. So reticular tissue, I think of a mesh. It looks like a mesh work of what are called supportive fibers or stroma. And these supportive fibers support the actual functional cells called the parenchym. I don't use those words often, but when I think of reticular fibers, I think of packing peanuts. It's the framework that your solid organs are built on. So hollow organs, I always think smooth muscle. Hollow organs have smooth muscle that moves material through them. Solid organs are filled with this packing peanuts. If you get a box from Amazon full of packing peanuts, that's not what you want. You reach in to grab what you want. So the functional cells like liver cells and these kind of things are going to be built on reticular tissue. So it is the packing peanuts or the framework that your solid organs are built on. Lean, liver, lymph nodes, bone marrow, these are all going to have reticular tissue. Last one is areolar tissue. This is really kind of non-specialized, just kind of a generic looking. It's usually the generic picture they use when they're looking at connective tissues in general. It's very loose. So I would say the key example for areolar tissue is going, which basically means loose, is going to be underlying. It's the connective tissue that attaches to your epithelial tissue. So we talk about membranes in a future video. Membranes are going to be epithelial tissue plus the connective tissue they're attached to. Most of those are going to be areolar tissue. Other than that, not a whole lot to know about here. They fill in the spaces between your muscle cells. But I would say these are the least important. All right, so those are your three types of loose connected tissue, adipose tissue, reticular tissue, and areolar tissue. I hope this helps. Have a wonderful day. Be blessed.