> Claimed result: Adopting expansive body postures for 2 minutes (like standing with hands on hips or arms raised) increases testosterone, decreases cortisol, and makes people feel more powerful and take more risks.

A heuristic I use that is unreasonably good at identifying grifters and charlatans: Unnecessarily invoking cortisol or other hormones when discussing behavioral topics. Influencers, podcasters, and pseudoscience practitioners love to invoke cortisol, testosterone, inflammation, and other generic concepts to make their ideas sound more scientific. Instead of saying "stress levels" they say "cortisol". They also try to suggest that cortisol is bad and you always want it lower, which isn't true.

Dopamine is another favorite of the grifters. Whenever someone starts talking about raising dopamine or doing something to increase dopamine, they're almost always being misleading or just outright lying. Health and fitness podcasters are the worst at this right now.

I have a draft of a blog post on this. Originally I was going to write about how cortisol isn't always bad, or good, it's just a chemical in us. But then I started noticing the pattern you point out here where I'm not sure anyone uses the cortisol argument in good faith. Everyone who brings up cortisol is usually trying to sell you something